Blue Llama, a leading local digital agency, has announced the launch of a new website for the Parish of St Helier (www.StHelier.je), helping the parish to realise a fresh vision for the way it engages, interacts with and serves the local community – with accessibility for all at its heart.
Demand for online access to community resources has steadily increased, with annual visits to parish websites recorded in previous years exceeding half a million. But the St Helier website’s performance requirements and functional brief had evolved since its original build, with an increasing need for users to find information with ease and an intuitive user experience (UX), as well as enable the parish to update its content to keep it up-to-date, in-house.
Looking for a collaborative partner that could help it get to the heart of its parishioner’s needs, and create a simple yet robust digital platform for an ever-changing community, the Parish commissioned non-profit-focused digital agency Blue Llama to deliver a full website re-design and build.
The new website (www.sthelier.je/), proudly displaying the blue and yellow of St Helier’s flag, is built with accessibility in mind and features a cleaner design, more user-friendly search options and defined resources for both parishioners and businesses. Available in several languages (English, Polish, Romanian, Portuguese, Thai) the site is equipped with ‘Do It Online’ functionality which helps to ease the pressure on local services, opportunities to contact the Connétable as well as provide feedback, giving parishioners new and easy ways to engage and interact with their parish. The new parish ’What’s On’ is a great new online resource to promote parish events and transactions such as Town Hall venue bookings and invoice payments can now also be made though the site.
“We were really thrilled to be asked to work on a new website for the Parish of St Helier” enthused Phil de Gruchy, Owner at Blue Llama. “I’m incredibly passionate about collaborating with non-profits and local councils. They often struggle with limited budgets or dated technology, restricting the ways in which they can engage with, and serve, their communities. So I’m very proud that our team were able to help, and set the Parish of St Helier up for future success.”
The St Helier site completes the recent overhaul of all 12 parish websites to bring a consistent look and feel – and a similar functionality and experience for all site visitors, no matter where you live in the Island. With a mission to make digital simple, Blue Llama are brilliant at creating a unified and dynamic digital community which serves all members of our society.
Connor Burgher, Head of Engagement & Town Centre Manager at the Parish of St Helier commented, “We had identified the need for an improved digital platform for our community but the project seemed daunting. After seeing the work that Blue Llama completed for a number of other parishes, we knew that our digital transformation would be in safe hands. Phil and the team were able to work with us as a Parish to identify exactly what it was we needed, and they were able to execute the project with passion, clarity and ease. The Parish of St Helier now has a future-proof digital platform that serves the community, and is set up to evolve and grow them with.”
Blue Llama are now working on the second phase of the St Helier project to provide richer information and more self service options to businesses and parishioners. This includes the digitalisation of Jersey Dog Licenses which is also due to launch before the end of the year.
