Background
Emergency Services (New Zealand Police, Fire and Emergency New Zealand, St John, and Wellington Free Ambulance) require secure, reliable communications to help enhance wellbeing, enforce the law, protect people and property, and communicate with each other.
Working together, Police(external link), Fire and Emergency New Zealand(external link), Wellington Free Ambulance(external link), and St John(external link) coordinated the development of an investment case to replace Emergency Services’ critical communications. This programme of work is known as Next Generation Critical Communications (NGCC).
Opportunity
The NGCC(external link) was a quickly formed organisation, requiring a new website in a short timeframe with an evolving vision and a need for a cost-effective approach with the ability to iterate as they grew.
NGCC needed a combined presence website to highlight their multiple programmes with the ability to future-proof, reducing the need for significant ongoing development costs. We were excited to offer Catalyst Starter.
Catalyst Starter is a pre-built Silverstripe theme that provides a quick, flexible, affordable website using standard web components. These are customisable to your needs or can be built on top of for more bespoke requirements.
Solution
In selecting Catalyst Starter, the NGCC benefited from several features to choose from right out of the box, such as:
- a library of pre-built and tested page types and content blocks that seamlessly configure web pages in a multitude of ways,
- CMS configurable layouts for navigation variations,
- the ability to set up multiple websites with the Catalyst Starter theme, using the subsites functionality,
- large variety of changeable fonts, theme colours and unique section colour options,
- flexible templates to control how content is displayed,
- being hosted on (external link)Catalyst Cloud.
Using the Catalyst Starter theme reduces the effort to design, develop and test many commonly used components from scratch, enabling agencies to spend budget on other valuable needs. The NGCC used the extra budget to ask the Catalyst design team to design the NGCC brand and assets used in additional materials. Because of this approach, we delivered not one but two functional websites for the NGCC organisation and the Public Safety Network Programme within the budget allocated to the project.
NGCC were thrilled with their new sites, as the delivery meant they could focus on what matters: delivering great content to their customers.