Initiated by the Ministry of Education, Grow Waitaha supports schools in Canterbury who are faced with rebuilding following the Canterbury earthquakes.
Building new learning environments means developing new ways of working in those environments and Grow Waitaha supports schools through this process of change.
We built the first iteration of the Grow Waitaha website in 2016. By 2019, the website’s audience had grown and the website had become a resource-rich hub for educators. To respond to this growth, we worked with Grow Waitaha to renew and curate the ever-growing site to make it more contemporary, user-centric and accessible.
Central to the success of Grow Waitaha’s website is Our Kete, a place where educational processes, resources and stories are stored and shared.
We worked alongside Grow Waitaha to audit and reorganise this resource rich section of the site while our developers implemented dual navigation, content tagging and powerful search function to help users filter and find what they are looking for.
We included more Te Reo Māori in the design to better reflect the strong bi-cultural commitment of the organisation.
Aiming to tell the story of Grow Waitaha with less words and more heart; we made recommendations to pare away some of the less visited parts of the site, and integrated others under more relevant headings as derived from our analytics review.
We drew stronger elements from the clients existing brand identity to create more continuity across their existing assets.
To help more New Zealand educators find Grow Waitaha, we reviewed the site’s search engine optimisation.
Creating an XML site map, open graph tags and improving the utilisation of keywords throughout the site.
We also restructured the Umbraco content management system to ensure the site remains organised and clean, unencumbered by changes in staff or fast growth, this will allow Grow Waitaha to remain agile and relevant with their messaging and resources without regular site improvements or reviews.
