We transformed Port of Newcastle’s slow, outdated site into a fast, future-proof platform with custom features, improved navigation and seamless migration.
The Challenge
Port of Newcastle is the largest port on Australia’s east coast by volume and Australia’s leading energy marketplace… a global gateway from the Hunter region to the world. The Port’s website used an outdated page builder-based theme, making it slow-running and tricky to navigate. The Port of Newcastle team also reported the site was difficult to manage and customise. The brief to OOTS was to transition all existing content to an easy-to-manage, up-to-date platform that would make posting content a breeze.
Our Approach
To make the new site future-proof, we opted to develop a fully-customised WordPress theme, integrating the latest Gutenberg technology. We swapped out the old and painfully slow-running page builder components with 23 speedy, custom-built Gutenberg blocks. As with all websites we create, we mapped the potential journeys users would make through the site. This step ensures we plan for all of the kinds of content that potentially could be hosted. The wireframing and site mapping processes ensure all content is easily accessible via an intuitive directory. The graphic design of the site was modernised and simplified, with the inclusion of an interactive map. To protect the SEO of the existing 58 pages and 143 blog posts, we performed a digital clean-up and phased content migration to our new templates. We run all our websites through the wringer, purposely trying to break them. With so much legacy content at stake, we doubled our stress-testing efforts to make sure everything was working without a hitch.
The Results
Port of Newcastle’s shiny, new digital destination is a beautiful piece of online real estate that is solid as a rock… with marked improvements in speed on the desktop site, and huge gains on the mobile versions. Not only is the site easier for customers to find, search and navigate; the Port of Newcastle team are finding the client-side interface much easier to work with. Most satisfyingly, the transition was made completely seamlessly, with zero downtime.
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