News Release

Thursday 18 October 2012

Rotorua District Council launches new website

ROTORUA 18.10.12: In the biggest change to online services since setting up its first website, Rotorua District Council (RDC) has launched a brand new website this week.

RDC Corporate & Customer Services group manager Jean-Paul Gaston said the new website would be live from Friday [19 October] and would feature a completely revamped navigation structure, a fresh simplified look and appearance, enhanced search facilities, and a range of other more user-friendly and customer-focussed features.

“While our old website was independently ranked in the country’s top ten local government websites, rather than rest on those laurels we wanted to take our site to a new level.

“The internet is an increasingly important channel for interacting and communicating with people in our community and other stakeholders, and it’s vital that we keep up to speed with their growing expectations in this dynamic digital age.

“The project has been a joint venture between our council and Hamilton City Council. This means we’ve been able to get the benefit of shared technical expertise while reducing development costs and timeframes. The new site is based on Hamilton’s award-winning website which they launched earlier and has proved very successful.

Mr Gaston said the completed project also provided a flexible platform for developing additional online services in the future. He said many of the council’s customers wanted to be able to conduct business with the council online, 24 hours a day, and seven days a week.

“Our recent introduction of the Dogs Online facility for registering dogs and managing records has proved a big hit with dog owners, and many people are already paying their rates online too.

“The next new customer service we will be adding to the site will allow people to pay their parking fines online rather than posting cheques or coming into the Civic Centre to pay in person. That will be made available in coming weeks and will mean parking infringements can be paid any time on any day of the week at the click of a mouse.

“A number of other new services in the pipeline will be added over time now that we have a vastly improved web platform in place that gives us the flexibility to develop more features for our customers.

“The project has cost approximately $66,000 and the joint venture arrangement with Hamilton means these costs are substantially less than we would otherwise have had to budget for. Councils are multi-faceted businesses and our website is very comprehensive, with a raft quite complex features and requirements, including the need to ensure security for online financial transactions.

“We encourage people to check out the new website, and to keep an eye on it for regular updating of council related news, announcements and new features,” said Mr Gaston.

Rotorua District Council's website address is rdc.govt.nz

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