City of Yellowknife

Client Overview

The City of Yellowknife delivers a wide range of municipal services to residents, businesses, and visitors across Canada’s North. Over time, its website had become the primary gateway to everything from utility payments and recreation programs to bylaws, permits, and emergency information. The website had grown around the City’s organizational structure, making information and services increasingly difficult to find.

The City partnered with zu to redesign and rebuild its municipal website using Drupal, creating a service-oriented digital experience that better reflects how people interact with their local government.

Challenge

Years of growth had left the website organized around departments instead of the tasks people were trying to accomplish. Finding information often meant navigating unfamiliar City structures or relying on Google to locate the right page.

Municipal services such as utility payments, recreation registration, service requests, and permits also lived across separate systems, creating disconnected experiences that made even routine interactions feel more complicated than they needed to be.

The opportunity was to create a clearer, more intuitive path to municipal services while giving City staff a stronger foundation for managing content and maintaining the website over time.

Solution

The project began with research. Through interviews, surveys, content analysis, and information architecture exercises with residents and City staff, we reorganized the website around common tasks and services instead of departmental ownership.

That structure shaped the rest of the experience. A contemporary digital design system extended the City’s visual identity across the website, while Drupal introduced standardized content models, editorial workflows, and governance tools that made content easier to manage and maintain. Automated migration scripts transitioned more than 1,000 bylaws and hundreds of news articles into the new platform.

Existing municipal platforms for payments, recreation, service requests, and other online services were integrated into the experience, while a unified search powered by Apache Solr and AI-enhanced semantic search helped residents find information across both website content and document libraries. Whether searching for a bylaw, permit, or service, users can discover relevant information through both keyword matching and contextual search.

The result is a Drupal municipal website that is easier to navigate, easier to manage, and built to evolve alongside the City’s digital services.