Stronger Christchurch

The Stronger Christchurch Infrastructure Rebuild Team (SCIRT) is responsible for rebuilding horizontal infrastructure in Christchurch following the earthquakes of 2010 and 2011. They are made up mostly of local people, many of whom have been directly affected by the earthquakes.

SCIRT, in collaboration with the Christchurch City Council had created an initial website which they wanted to extend with greater functionality and fresh branding. They chose Egressive to help with this task, partly due to our extensive work with the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority (CERA) and our CMS expertise.

One of the main purposes of the redesign was to make information available to the public more easily. They identified four areas of infrastructure for rebuild: roads, fresh water, wastewater and storm water. Each has associated images, FAQs, work notices and articles. Each of these types of content can stand alone, but we were able to create relationships between related information on the site to enrich the experience. For example, on the wastewater page, the content knows to pull in related images of broken pipes, and on the website's gallery page, images across the entire site are pulled together to give a broad overview of the breadth of SCIRT's work.

In addition to the rebranding, we have added support for mobile devices like tablets and smartphones. At 4% of their viewing traffic (as of Nov 2011) SCIRT wanted a simplified version of the website to appear on those sorts of devices, as these are often carried and used by contractors in the field, and are a preferred means for accessing the website by many members of the public.

We have been able to develop a strong relationship with SCIRT's in-house developers and content editors which allowed a seamless transformation from the old site to the new.

We look forward to continuing our work with SCIRT and future enhancements to the website.

The redesigned website went live on the 22nd December, 2011.