Bendigo Law Courts — new Drupal website using CivicTheme

Bendigo Law Courts’ challenge

The new Bendigo Law Court was designed to better serve the community’s needs for safe, modern, and accessible justice facilities. To complement the new building, Court Services Victoria wanted a website and content management solution to support its suite of digital wayfinding products, including self-service kiosks.

Bendigo Law Courts’ transformation — meeting functional and emotional needs

CivicTheme was chosen to provide a mature visual theme that delivers a high quality site with less time and at a lower cost. CivicTheme was used mostly out-of-the-box, with some customisations to deliver the requirements.

Following two discovery sessions, CivicTheme requirements were divided in three categories:

1. Adopt — delivered with no changes to the out-of-the-box CivicTheme feature
2. Adapt — delivered with some extension of an existing out-of-the-box feature
3. Custom — creating a new CivicTheme component

The custom components included:

• Building maps and tab filters
  
• Legal and support services tab filters
  
• Live daily courts schedule – data via API (not enabled at the moment)
  

The project team also built a custom Kiosk CMS (integrated into the Drupal CMS) and API between the website and onsite kiosk system so website content authors can easily manage content displayed on the kiosk terminals around the building.

The platform

The new Bendigo Law Courts website was built on Salsa Hosting. Salsa Hosting is up to 20x faster, 16x greener, 2x cheaper, and significantly more secure.

It uses QuantCDN for the benefits of a content delivery network (CDN) and QuantWAF for additional cybersecurity.

QuantCDN provides benefits such as:

• Cheaper hosting costs
• Improved security
• Faster websites
• The ability to scale easily during peak demands

QuantWAF monitors and filters incoming web traffic, identifying and blocking malicious requests and maintaining compliance with security standards. This helps to protect sensitive data, prevent cyberattacks and ensures compliance with regulatory requirements. 

The outcomes — a better citizen experience

• A new, visually appealing Bendigo Law Courts website
• A quick, easy and cost-effective site build with CivicTheme
• A WCAG AA compliant website
• A website that complements the broader project and makes it easier for people to engage with the court
• Integration between a kiosk CMS (from the new Drupal website) and the kiosk system
• Live updates of court schedules (not enabled at the moment)
• Connection between the new physical building and the new website to support users before and after a court event. In particular to help them:
  • Prepare for going to court
  • Find their way around the courts building once they’re there
  • Connect to support services if needed
• The benefits of Salsa Hosting including reduced costs, improved security, faster load times and scalability
• The benefits of QuantWAF for cybersecurity