Amsterdam
Barbara Strozzilaan 1011083 HN Amsterdam
Netherlands+31 10 307 7131info@kruso.nl
A climate-reducing and ambitious design that meets best-in-class requirements for web accessibility.
In January 2021, Kruso's collaboration with Herning Municipality, Inklusio, Special Minds, and Mundfuld Studio began on a new website for the municipality. A year later, Herning Municipality has a modern Umbraco solution built on Publify, Kruso's municipal development community.
We are particularly proud to go live with the country's first CO2-reducing municipal website, which at the same time has a comprehensive focus on web accessibility for all the municipality's citizens.
Herning Municipality needed an update of design, but first and foremost, there was a technical need. The most important points for the municipality were user-friendliness for both citizens and the municipality's editors, a new design, and a consistent focus on web accessibility.
The solution is built on Umbraco open-source CMS. In addition to ensuring unique user-friendliness for the editors, this is a flexible solution with lots of different integrations and can thus be explicitly adapted to Herning Municipality's needs.
In building Herning Municipality's new solution, there was cooperation and sparring between frontend and UX early in the process. This sparring resulted in UX knowing what the possibilities within the framework of the Publify core were from the beginning. Thus, Kruso, in meetings with the municipality and the external designer from Mundfuld Studio, could be at the forefront and make sure early on that the different parts of the process adapted to each other.
The work with web accessibility happened in collaboration with Inklusio and Special Minds IT, experts in the field. Kruso generally focuses on web accessibility, but expert advice and assessment throughout the process has ensured a consistent focus on web accessibility from UX and design to the development process itself.
When we develop our setup, we make extensive use of SiteImprove. This time, it has also proved to be a great advantage to involve some experts who look through the solution manually. It has given us a new insight into what works best for the user when we talk about web accessibility.
One of the new functionalities that have been developed specifically for Herning is a new user-friendly solution for filtering searches on their website. Specifically, we made a refactoring of the faceted lists, which makes it possible to do a local search on the site. This means, that the user is given the opportunity to search more specifically and topic-related in the given list.
In addition, specifically for Herning Municipality, we have added a "Climate-friendly view" function. This function reduces the CO2 footprint by 30% for each page view and up to 70% on pages with many images. With a focus on climate friendliness, we have hidden data-heavy elements such as images and videos, removed intense colors, and created a more climate-friendly code.
Watch a conversation about our take on sustainable web development here.
The collaboration with Herning Municipality has generally been rewarding for us. Throughout the process, they have presented some exciting demands, but at the same time, they have been good at listening to our suggestions.
There is still a close dialogue between Kruso and Herning municipality concerning operations and new development, and with a view to web accessibility in the content posted by the municipality's editors. Herning municipality can now offer its citizens a new and more climate-friendly website with an ambitious design that meets their needs and best-in-class requirements for web accessibility.
Do you have any questions on public solutions?
Get in touch with our managing director Anders Frey Birkmose.