Challenge

Aarhus is the largest city in Jutland and a city of more than 300,000 inhabitants. It is the centre of “Greater Aarhus,” which has a population of approximately 1.2 million people. Aarhus is also Denmark’s fastest-growing city and leading growth centre.

The City of Aarhus wanted to develop a new website that would enable its citizens to serve themselves, and also to find information about the municipality and the city.

Some goals for the new site included:

• Functionality that supports interaction and dialogue between the citizen and the Municipality of Aarhus.
• Design that is simple and readable, with multimedia assets including audio, images and video.
• A thorough focus on accessibility in designing usability and content, thus securing a site that lives up to the WCAG standards.

Solution

Working with Sitecore partner, Pentia, Aarhus chose Sitecore, because “Sitecore can be adapted to our needs, almost no matter what we want.”

Result

Today, the site offers a more attractive and contemporary design that has a clear and user-centered structure. Sitecore is used by many municipalities in Denmark, and websites built on Sitecore can meet the guidelines for accessibility. The main site is in Danish, but some content is also available in English. In addition to the Sitecore CMS, Sitecore’s Web Forms for Marketers and Google Maps are being used on the site. Sitecore Foundry is also used to provide easy-to-build websites for smaller institutions, partly based on templates.

Other features of the new site include:

• Self-service solutions for citizens, including the use of dynamic forms and digital forms
• Interactive functionalities such as Newsletter, RSS, blogs, Forum, Podcasts, etc.
• Updated, well-organized content – engaging to both external and internal stakeholders
• Reusable content - Aarhus appreciates the ability to build additional websites with Sitecore that have a different visual design than the “main site,” with data stored in the same structure. These sites provide excellent opportunities for institutions, special projects et al to have independent profiles within a corporate framework

Technical Description

Solution Special Ingredients

• Google Maps
• Sitecore Web Forms for Marketers