Torres Strait island Regional Council
A digital upgrade for
the Torres Strait
Built for community
and accessibility
The Torres Strait Island Regional Council (TSIRC) is Australia’s most northernly municipality, representing 15 unique island communities. The council is responsible for delivering essential services and governance to remote island communities across the Torres Strait. Their website serves as a vital resource for residents, government agencies, and other stakeholders by providing access to policies, service information, reports, news, and community updates.
Forte Marketing undertook a full website redesign for TSIRC, including content migration, copywriting, information architecture improvements, a modernised CMS, and enhanced performance. The project also ensured full compliance with Australian Government requirements for accessibility, security, and technical performance.
Move the slider to compare the before and after.
The challenge
TSIRC’s previous website had some structural issues both in the front and back end, making navigation difficult and content discovery inefficient. With over 1,000 resources to migrate including policies, meeting minutes, reports, content pages and news articles, our challenge was to ensure a seamless transition to a more user-friendly and efficient platform while implementing a fully accessible and secure solution that met government standards.
Information Architecture
We completely restructured the website navigation and content architecture to enhance usability and content discovery. Our approach included:
- Standardising page templates to create a consistent and intuitive user experience.
- A new navigation structure that allowed users to find key information quickly (using a mega menu and content categories)
- A category tagging system in the CMS, enabling content managers to cross-reference content dynamically across multiple sections.
- Service pages with contextual cross-links, ensuring easy access to relevant reports, policies, and resources.
The solution
We delivered a modern, accessible, and high-performance website built to serve TSIRC’s diverse audiences and allow administrators to update content efficiently.
Optimised performance
With a combination of best practices, compression techniques and a custom cloud-base hosting solution we were able to decrease loading times consistently. While we don’t always measure using PageSpeed Insights, we achieved 100% scores in SEO, Best Practices, and Accessibility, and a 94% in terms of performance.
Flexible, efficient visual builder
We customised a visual builder component that allow content administrators to add and edit content easily while ensuring compliance and performance.
Government compliance
The platform meets Australian Government standards for usability, accessibility, security, and performance.
Custom search engine
Implemented an enhanced search functionality for quick content discovery.
Technical SEO
We helped to create a write engaging and SEO-friendly content while taking care of all the technical SEO aspects across the site, including a robust 301-redirect strategy during the migration.
Ongoing hosting and maintenance
We provide ongoing support and management to maintain website performance and security.
Fully responsive design
With a high number of users using mobile devices in remote locations, we focused our efforts to ensure a mobile friendly experience.
Let's get to work
If you want your next web development initiative to be part of your success story, we’d love to hear from you. If you have a project in mind, but aren’t sure where to start, you can book a one hour free consultation with our team.
