Halifax Water

Halifax Water sought to overhaul its existing web presence to better serve its customers and provide a scalable platform to leverage emerging technologies. Originally tied to the City of Halifax website, Halifax Water wanted a standalone website.

Halifax Water provides critical water, fire protection, wastewater, and stormwater services to Halifax’s approximate 355,000 residents. The utility employs approximately 450 people and has assets in excess of $1 billion. 

Halifax Water needed to update their existing web presence to accommodate the future adoption of its customer support program. This program involves the installation of 83,000 smart meters across the utility’s service area that would allow them to remotely monitor water meters without the need to send a technician. This would improve the quality of Halifax Water’s service and cut costs down over time. 

The utility provider ultimately selected OPIN for the project based on their utility and public sector experience and expertise in the Drupal content management system.

Confident that the agency would meet all of its goals, Halifax Water selected OPIN to complete its ambitious web project. OPIN, known for its dedicated specialization in Drupal, built Halifax Water’s comprehensive technology solution on Drupal 8, the latest version of the content management system (CMS) and Halifax Water’s existing platform. 

Developed with mobile-first in mind and renowned for its scalability and flexibility compared to other CMS's, Drupal 8 was the perfect platform for the new website, however, the full capabilities of the platform were not realized on the existing site. OPIN’s team greatly improved success rates and directness of findability on the Halifax Water website.

OPIN’s design and development work for Halifax Water demonstrated best practices in public sector design, as well as the OPIN team’s creativity. The website, particularly compared to other municipal utilities, is a great pleasure to use. 

Information is more easily accessible, the objective and purpose of each page are clear and succinct, and the simplified design makes effective use of branding assets and white space - adding character to the site while keeping it simple to use. 

Furthermore, OPIN was able to increase the effectiveness of Halifax Water’s existing technology investments while getting to market faster (and more cheaply) rather than re-engineering them.

OPIN’s longstanding partner, Acquia, provided Halifax Water with the world’s leading Drupal hosting platform: Acquia Cloud Enterprise. In addition to this powerful hosting solution, Acquia will provide 24x7x365 support and an SLA of 99.95% to Halifax Water to ensure their site is always serving their customers once it is launched. 

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