AnewwebsiteforSylviaPark
Sylvia Park has transformed. Making a long-term vision a reality, it’s now a place to Shop, Eat, Play, Live, and Work. Here’s how we helped the website catch up with its new precinct identity.
About Sylvia Park
Sylvia Park is the largest shopping centre in New Zealand, which is owned by Kiwi Property Group. Undergoing a shift in recent years, retail is mixing more with entertainment, eateries and residential developments to create community hubs. Having made moves to realise the vision, the Sylvia Park website needed a website to match.
The project in summary
Through our ‘Understand, Design, and Build’ process, we’ve evolved the refreshed Sylvia Park branding to suit a new digital format. Through an iterative process, we’ve designed the experience to integrate all the eat, work, live, and shop opportunities on offer at the location, as well as support user experiences and flows across the website. A design system was developed. This provides consistent and quickly replicable web components, supporting the natural evolution of core pages and new campaign pages for the numerous events Sylvia Park hosts.
Once into technical build, we moved in two-week sprints, enabling logical areas of the website to be built together. This was supported by our continuous integration and deployment approach to development, allowing tandem design feedback and content changes to take place between the Dynamo6 and Kiwi Property teams. Overall, the website is powered by Silverstripe CMS with a purpose-built and easy-to-use administration interface. Dynamo6’s Advanced Host keeps the website secure, scalable and fast. Ongoing platform patching and updates are kept on top of through a managed support arrangement.
The new Sylvia Park website reflects our vision for a mixed-use community website. Dynamo6's understanding of our goals and meticulous design process helped us create a digital platform that connects all aspects of Sylvia Park, from shopping and dining to work and entertainment.
Dive into the details
The bigger picture
Kiwi Property wanted to change Sylvia Park into a mixed-use community. To integrate experiences they needed a digital platform that connected and delivered a cross-platform experience, capable of managing hundreds of thousands of data points. Through our digital and technology consulting, we guided a long-term delivery roadmap and feasibility plan.
We needed a website that could handle the complexity of our evolving precinct model. Dynamo6's long-term vision and robust technology stack ensure the Sylvia Park website is future-proof and ready to integrate seamlessly with future innovations.
Crafting the experience
Shifting from a retail-centric approach to a community vision required an immersion into the concept. Drawing on Kiwi Propery’s research, as well as international examples for benchmarking, we held workshops with the Kiwi Property team to unpick the vision and internal needs.
Throughout the experience (UX) and interface (UI) design, we were mindful of balancing brand goals alongside user needs. Through a continuous feedback approach to prototyping, we honed in on key user flows. This process created the website experience blueprint. Some of the key outputs were:
- A header to set the scene instantly,
- A scannable page narrative,
- Information weighting and layering,
- and a natural page flow.
Supporting the marketing toolkit
During the project’s ‘Understand phase’, functional requirements were established. Custom controls were included to manage the hundreds of stores and adjust opening hours, locations and maps that also integrate into the wayfinding kiosks in Sylvia Park. The mapping system was also integrated by us.
Landing pages, which support Sylvia Park’s packed marketing calendar, were specified to ensure the custom-built CMS functionality had everything required. They are built to support the creation and updates of events, as well as be quickly replicable with a beautiful front-end design; overall, delivering a valuable addition to the marketing toolkit.
Have a browse
If you’re looking for a fantastic place to shop, eat, work, live, or discover the latest events, check out the options available at Sylvia Park.