Background
Healthify He Puna Waiora(external link) is Aotearoa, New Zealand’s go-to website for reliable, simple and accessible health information to help people make informed health decisions. It provides easy access to information to support the health and wellbeing of all people living in New Zealand.
The Healthify website (formerly known as Health Navigator NZ) is comprehensive and easy to use, making it straightforward for people to access self-help resources.
Challenge
The decision to build a new website and engage a new developer was multifactorial. First, the site was on a content management system that wasn’t well supported, and the web team faced an uphill challenge to stay on top of the ageing infrastructure. Second, while the site functionality wasn’t overly complex, there was no longer sufficient support from their agency. They decided that propping up a creaking, out-of-date system without appropriate support was not the best way forward.
From here, Healthify engaged Catalyst, and the biggest challenge from our point of view was content migration. The old site had approximately 5,000 pages. The Health Navigator Charitable Trust team removed about 2,000 of them - including a comprehensive video library, before migration, leaving about 3,000+ pages. There were also 1000s of images, brochures, and factsheets as part of this massive data set. Once the initial content was moved over, there were additional secondary and tertiary migrations.
Solution
Catalyst built Healthify a new home using the Catalyst Starter theme, which is a pre-built Silverstripe framework with a collection of commonly used modules pre-installed. Using the Catalyst Starter theme saves initial set-up time and has a lot of features configured out-of-the-box, providing the team with a solid starting point to build from.
Silverstripe CMS is a visual platform that is easy to understand for non-technical people, making it easy for the client to maintain the content.
As part of the site rebuild, the website name and brand change required Catalyst to be adaptable to get the new brand guidelines bedded into satisfaction. In addition, the website needed to meet WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standards and be mobile-first. These priorities made it more accessible to a greater range of potential users. Once the design was signed off and the migrations complete, the rest of the job was relatively smooth sailing.
At every available opportunity, Catalyst contributes to the open source projects on which its customers' solutions are built. As part of this project, our developers identified an opportunity to boost the database performance of a CMS component, the contribution for which will be available in an upcoming release of the Silverstripe framework.
Healthify is hosted on Catalyst Cloud, a proven technology used by major government agencies, owned, operated and controlled by New Zealanders, meaning data is resilient and secure.
