Serving our communities better with an improved website

We have updated our external website to deliver a more intuitive and user-friendly experience that will enable us to better serve our communities, especially those at risk.

The update went live on Thursday at https://fireandemergency.nz(external link), with a new homepage design and menu system being the key improvements that have been made.

Earlier in the year, we undertook a review of the website to see what we could do better to ensure people interacting with it were able to find the information they needed.

One of the key findings of this review was to implement a menu system. This helps people to navigate to where they need to go more easily.

The homepage redesign was another key component that was identified as needing updating. The new look and feel is more modern and intuitive than what we had previously. It also allows us greater flexibility for what content we have on the homepage, enabling us to direct the public to different areas of interest depending on what is relevant at the time.

During the update process, we reviewed all of our pages to ensure they were in the right place. That has meant shifting some pages around to ensure they’re in a spot that makes sense to the most amount of people.

The new website was tested by almost 100 people – both members of the public and Fire and Emergency staff. Their feedback was vital in helping develop the website you see today. If you have any further suggestions for improvements you can fill out the form on the contact us part of the website here(external link). 

This is the first (and most noticeable) of ongoing changes we will be making to the website. We will also be rolling out new webpage templates across every section, which will further enhance our user experience and make our website more engaging, with easier navigation within sections, more visuals and plain language. We’re also working on improving accessibility to the site by adding te reo Māori translations to things such as menus and headings. These will be rolled out as we continue development of the website over the coming months.