Billund Municipality

Billund dreams of a website functioning as a "digital town hall" for the city's citizens and businesses, where they can quickly look up information and intuitively serve themselves around the clock. The website should be the first point of contact between citizens and the municipality before they contact citizen services to make the municipality's work processes more efficient and more manageable.

Furthermore, the wish is for citizens to gain increased insight through the website and thus have a greater opportunity to participate actively in democracy. With the development of new functionalities and design, the website must also support the narrative of Billund Municipality as the "playground of the future" and the "children's capital".

Throughout the process, there has been close cooperation between Kruso and Billund Municipality, from workshops and approval of UX and design to continuous functionality testing in the development phase.

First, we have offered the municipality the Publify software, which suits Billund Municipality's needs. Publify makes it easy for editors to create content while also supporting them in creating search engine-optimized content that meets the requirements for web accessibility. In addition, the solution offers a comprehensive UX & Design process based on our experience with other municipalities and contemporary standards.

Billund Municipality is the first municipality on Publify 2 built on Umbraco 10 - the solution is thus built on a completely new and optimized platform, which is, among other things, faster than previous Umbraco versions. In addition, the design of the solution benefits from a UI based on our many years of experience with municipal sites and new trends - but with a focus on Billund Municipality's inputs and DNA. The solution contains faceted lists used to create news lists and overviews of daycare centres, schools, etc. In addition, Kruso has developed an RSS reader, also called a news aggregator or news reader, which collects web content, such as online newspapers, in one place for easier viewing. This way, news about Billund from Ritzau can be displayed on the municipality's website. The editors' work gets more accessible with a built-in notes function so that editors can share internal comments. In addition, we have implemented the Notify Editor function, which allows the editors to create a reminder for themselves about a future update of the page.

Billund will get a website based on the latest Umbraco technology, focusing on ease of use for editors, easily accessible information for citizens and, not least, web accessibility. Web accessibility is ensured, among other things, through an automatic accessibility check so that we can generate lists and correct any accessibility challenges so that these never reach the live environment.

In the project with Billund.dk, we have benefitted from experience from previous projects concerning digital climate friendliness. In practice, we have not included unnecessary plugins, which decreases the downloaded page size. In addition, we have used webp image formats, which have up to 26% smaller file size than the PNG format, thereby providing faster, more sustainable loading of the page without degrading the image quality.

The new billund.dk goes live in December and then transitions to our standard support set-up with the service desk and monitoring of the solution. Billund Municipality thus joins the Publify community with 15 other municipalities. The website is operated by Kruso and hosted in a 100% green hosting centre.

If you are interested in our municipal solutions, you can read more about public digitization here.

Do you have any questions on Publify or public solutions?

Get in touch with CIO & partner Anders Frey Birkmose.

afb@kruso.dk

+45 41 95 33 30