Client
Taranaki Emergency Management (TEMO)
Services
User Research
Design
Web Development
Digital Strategy
Hosting
Umbraco CMS
Visit
Taranaki Emergency Management needed a website that could do two jobs exceptionally well: support day-to-day readiness and education, and switch gears quickly to become a high-performing public information channel during an emergency response.
Effect partnered with TEMO to design and build Taranaki Emergency Management | Civil Defence with a focus on clarity, accessibility, mobile use, and operational publishing, backed by a delivery approach that included workshop-led design, robust testing, and editor training.
Living alongside Taranaki Mounga means living with genuine volcanic risk. Assessed as the region’s top hazard. The new Emergency Management Office website turns that risk into readiness, giving residents clear guidance well ahead of any event.
Our approach
We started with a collaborative design process to ensure TEMO’s content, operational requirements, and user needs were reflected in the site structure and page templates from day one.
Discovery
A key part of this was an onsite, workshop-led approach. Effect facilitated a one-day design workshop with TEMO, then translated those outcomes into a complete set of page designs, navigation structure, and reusable components so the site could remain consistent and easy to publish over time. The initial scope focused on delivering a complete website foundation, including the design system, core templates, key content sections, integrations, training, and go-live support.
Design
Effect delivered a defined colour palette, visual designs for all pages, and a new information architecture, including homepage structure, along with iconography and fonts for hazards, impacts, and Get Ready sections, promotional banner and tile styles, and facilitation of onsite design workshops at TEMO. TEMO, in turn, provided branding and design assets, along with feedback and final approval of designs.
MetService integration
Effect integrated MetService's CAP (Common Alerting Protocol) feed directly into the site, giving the public access to official weather alerts and warnings without the content team needing to manually source or publish them.
Get Ready landing pages
Effect built a new Get Ready landing page template, then carried out a full review and enhancement of the template to better support Rural Ready stories and content ensuring rural communities had a clear, dedicated pathway to relevant preparedness information rather than being folded into general content.
Recovery section
Effect delivered a dedicated recovery section template, along with homepage navigation behaviour that automatically links through to recovery content when the site is switched into Recovery mode so the public is guided straight to the right information depending on what phase of an event the region is in.
Response section
Effect designed and developed the initial response pages, laying the groundwork for how the site would present critical information during an active emergency.
Te Reo translation support
Effect provided design and development support for Te Reo Māori translation of page titles, reflecting TEMO's commitment to accessible, bicultural communication for the community it serves.
Ongoing scope: Response Mode
After the initial build, TEMO commissioned additional scope to strengthen and standardise the site's response publishing capability, ensuring the site could be rapidly reconfigured during an event using templates purpose-built for emergency information. This work marked the beginning of the response mode template, which has since been shared and reused across other councils.
Our other work in this sector
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