Imagine Newcastle: Moving talent to a progressive, regional city

A progressive city with a skills shortage

In the last 15 years the city of Newcastle has transformed. Its history as an industrial town has been eclipsed by massive growth in renewable energy, technology, creative arts and a large investments in city infrastructure and education. It is now a progressive, affordable, creative city by the sea home to more artists per capita than any other Australian city.

As the city changed, and new businesses grew, the demand for skilled professionals to fill roles in science, technology, engineering and maths also grew. The local workforce was not large enough to fill these specialist roles, and a need was born to attract millenial and Gen X professionals to move to Newcastle.

User research drove the product

The first iteration of the campaign (before Mudbath’s involvement) brought 30 new movers to Newcastle through the $10,000 incentive campaign. Mudbath conducted user research with this group of movers to understand their motivations, lifestyle, pain points and user journey when making the move (pictured above).

Cost of living, type of neighbourhood, proximity to nature and opportunities to ‘build a community’ were the most important considerations for movers.

A tour is the most valuable point in the journey

Overwhelmingly users told us that visiting the city while in the consideration phase proved to be the factor that ‘clinched the decision’ to make the move. With this feedback, a tours component was proposed for the new website that would capture leads and offer free tours to people considering the move.

A content site with flexible components

Mudbath developed a content site with over 20 custom designed components that could be re-used and rearranged as the product released further content pages and features.

Development of each component had multiple goals in mind; to create a fresh, engaging and creative design for the website viewer, seamless authoring experience for the content loader in the CMS and a library of components that could be used to build a new page in a single day if required.

The website employs significant front-end CSS to accommodate animated icons, seamless scrolling background colours, rotating menu items, a flexible masonry grid and a delayed reveal on scroll. These design enhancements combine to create a unique user experience that reflects the creativity of the city itself.

Solution architecture

As City of Newcastle used Kentico as their CMS across their suite of websites, CN content authors had experience with the platform and were used to the interface for content loading. For this reason, Mudbath employed Kentico for the delivery of the website.

The Mudbath development team had not used Kentico before, but our many years of experience with similar platofm Umbraco helped us to adapt to this new platform quickly. The delivery was also supported by SQL, Azure, Asp.net and .net6 platforms.