The Problem
Place Management NSW came to us for a brand new website to drive more traffic to the precinct by better showcasing its events and businesses. This was part of a broader strategy, alongside social media, to bring more people into The Rocks. The brief specified Kentico, Place Management's preferred CMS, so their own team could manage content themselves once the site was live.
My focus was the UX of the site including the hierarchy, usability, and making sure we were solving the right problem and working out how to structure templates within that system that would best showcase the precinct.
The existing site made that hard. Dating back to the 90s and limited by its platform, it worked more like a directory than a destination: content was there, but poorly organised, hard to engage with, and did little to build genuine awareness of what was actually happening in the precinct.
Findings
I ran two threads of research: I spoke with 8 tenants and businesses across The Rocks, sourced through Place Management NSW to understand what they wanted the website to do for them, and separately with 6 customers to understand their actual behaviour when deciding what to do or where to eat, which channels they reached for, and what they needed to act on that decision, like maps and the ability to book.
Across almost every conversation, the same two things came up as what tenants most wanted: make people aware of what was on at The Rocks, and help people decide where to eat.
The existing site didn't support either well. Business detail pages worked like a plain directory. It showed the name, address, basic details but nothing that helped a visitor get a feel for a business without clicking away to its own site or socials. Several tenants said they'd stopped updating their page altogether, because the site's own traffic was low next to their other channels, so it functioned more as a funnel out than a destination in its own right.
Solution
Working from the content audit, tenant interviews, and personas, I mapped a new information architecture and wireframed the redesigned templates.
Lead with a refreshed homepage that actually promotes what's on
To put awareness of events and businesses front and centre, I redesigned the homepage around a spotlight section in the hero. This was an ongoing rotating campaign surfacing precinct businesses, from newly opened venues to long-standing favourites. I also created a new "Local's Guide" section to house editorial content recommending the best things to see and do at The Rocks, so the homepage itself was doing the work of building awareness, rather than leaving it to a buried listings page.
Rebuild detail pages around how people actually decide where to eat
This is where tenant and customer feedback shaped the design most directly. People told us they "eat with their eyes first" by seeing photos of food and venues are what actually move someone from curious to booked. So I led with a large hero and gallery component on every business page, rather than burying imagery below a block of directory text.
This also matched what came up in the customer interviews about social media: people didn't just trust curated photography, they wanted to see what other people were actually posting, as evidence the place was worth visiting, not just a business's own highlight reel. So alongside the gallery, I added direct links to each business's social accounts, giving visitors a second, less-curated source of proof.
Beyond that, the redesigned pages added what a visitor would actually need to act in the moment, a map to help them get there, and direct CTAs to book a table or view the menu, both pulled directly from what customers told us they needed to go from "interested" to "going." Everything sits on the page itself, rather than requiring a click out to a separate site to do anything.
Validating the designs before launch
Before the templates were finalised, I ran usability testing with customers on the new designs and presented the findings back to Place Management NSW confirming the new patterns actually held up with real users, not just in review with the client. Once that was validated, I handed off to the UI team to apply branding, colour, and final visual treatment to the templates, ahead of development. We worked in a waterfall process on this project: UX validated first, then UI, then build.
Conclusion
Organic acquisition to the site grew 200% following launch. Place Management NSW was delighted with the outcome of the redesign. The design templates we built in the Kentico CMS streamlined handover, so the client's own team could update pages and content themselves going forward. Soon after launch, Place Management was satisfied enough with the results to propose reusing the same templates for the Darling Harbour website.
The Rocks website won the Global Kentico Site of the Year 2020 award, in the government and municipal category.