City of Regina

The City of Regina is the municipal governing body for Saskatchewan’s capital, serving more than 230,000 residents and supported by nearly 1,600 employees. For the City, Regina.ca is where civic life happens. Residents come to pay parking tickets, check transit schedules, find recycling and road information, apply for permits, and register for recreation. In late 2017, after twelve years of stagnancy, the City engaged zu to redesign and rebuild Regina.ca, including a full CMS replacement. The work ran into early 2019 and focused on one goal: turn an aging, hard-to-use municipal website into a clear, citizen-first service platform that City teams could sustain long after launch.

Regina.ca was showing its age. After twelve years without meaningful evolution, the site was difficult to navigate, not built for mobile use, and shaped by internal departments and insider language rather than citizen tasks. Content sprawl intensified the problem. Thousands of pages had grown over time without a strong governance model, creating duplication, dead ends, and an information architecture that made common tasks harder than they should be. The City also needed to consolidate multiple municipal web properties into a single experience and integrate essential services such as transit, utilities, and payments, with a foundation City teams could sustain after launch.

We rebuilt Regina.ca with a mobile-first, user-centred approach guided by one rule: craft the experience with citizens, not for citizens. Navigation and language were tested with the public through surveys, interviews, electronic card sorting, and Treejack validation, engaging more than 1,000 residents and stakeholders. The feedback was consistent, residents wanted a utilitarian website that made essential services fast to find and easy to use.

That direction drove a complete re-architecture of the platform. Approximately 2,500 pages of content were audited and reduced to roughly 300 purposeful pages. Three municipal subsites were consolidated into one, and 25 lines of business and 60 services were reorganized into seven task-based categories, replacing a department-first structure with a citizen-first one.

The rebuild was delivered on OpenCMS, the City’s required Java-based CMS, with Apache Solr search. Templates and custom components established a consistent foundation, while integrations connected residents to the services they rely on, including a custom accessible interface for Google Transit and tools for parking, water usage, leisure programming, and road reporting.

To make the work durable, zu paired the build with governance through a comprehensive style guide, documentation, and training that equipped City teams to manage and evolve the platform confidently. The result is a civic utility built for real tasks, where three sites became one, 2,500 pages became 300, and 60 services became seven clear pathways.