Bitou Local Municipality Website upgrade
The Bitou Local Municipality is a municipality that is part of Garden Route District Municipality located in the Western Cape Province of South Africa with an area of 992 km², serving a population of approximately 70,000 residents.
The Western Cape Government Department of Economic Development and Tourism (DEDAT) assisted the Bitou Municipality as part of the WCG Municipal Ease of Doing Business Fund, with the aim of providing capacity and funding support to municipalities to make it easier for businesses to do business in the Western Cape.
The objective of the fund is to:
- Alleviate the administrative and other associated burdens, including the time, cost, and complexity for both businesses and municipalities;
- Improve overall performance of municipal services and processes related to business-facing services, such as permitting and
- Support district and local municipalities to institutionalise Ease of Doing Business and become well-functioning institutions that deliver quality and efficient services.
The Bitou Local Municipality’s website was outdated and did not reflect the needs of businesses within the region. This is despite analytics of the municipality indicating that most companies are visiting the municipality’s website as a first point to access information and that businesses access information via the website more than the municipality’s social media handles.
Key challenges that the municipality was experiencing on the website are:
- Lack of an effective search function which displays results in an easy-to-use and sequenced order.
- Outdated web forms not providing relevant functionality for a business wishing to contact the municipality and seek information from them.
- Limited access and means for businesses to engage the municipality.
- The municipality’s website does not support instant access to information that is on par with industry norms.
The municipality sought to upgrade the Bitou Municipality’s website to address the above-mentioned challenges. Furthermore, this upgrade would assist in reducing time, complexity, and cost for businesses. It would promote the ease of doing business as a result of access to information, and the ability to engage with the municipality digitally when wanting to do business in the region. African Ideas was contracted to upgrade and modernise their municipal website, which was on an outdated, Drupal 7 version. We delivered a modernised website with significantly more functionality using Drupal 10 (the latest version of Drupal). This was the first Drupal 10 local government site to go live in South Africa.
