The Arctic capital’s new online service – Rovaniemi.fi energizes, harmonizes, and boosts the city’s identity

The aim was for Rovaniemi's website to serve as a drawcard communicating vitality and trust and to strengthen the local area's attractiveness to visitors. This challenge was successfully met by utilizing various content and technical solutions as well as through its new visual identity and storytelling methods. The end result is a polished, trustable, and accessible masterpiece of northern expertise and Arctic magic.

The mobile use of the Rovaniemi.fi website, which has grown significantly over the years, was particularly well catered for in the website renewal. The concept, user interface solutions, and technical implementation were also strongly influenced by the new legislation on accessibility. The new service had to serve all users equally, regardless of their devices and limitations –– the focus of the renewal was on usability and accessibility.

The old online service had outlived its usefulness and the searchability of its information had deteriorated. This also came to light in a user survey conducted by the city. The renewal project completely redesigned the structure of the online service and improved the discoverability of information with various new visual, functional, and content creation solutions. The service descriptions were stored in the Suomi.fi portal’s service database for easy maintenance. The content was truncated, condensed, and grouped together to make the service clearer and content management smoother. Structural clarity facilitates not only the comprehensibility and maintenance of information but also discoverability, as it simplifies site navigation and improves search engine visibility.

As part of the service design, we decided to start utilizing the service information from the Finnish Service Catalogue (FSC), a centralised data repository, more efficiently in the new online service. The aim was to reduce duplication of work and to share the responsibility for updating the service description in the FSC between the various departments of the city’s administration and also with the city’s external service providers.

One significant new feature on offer is service packages. The Suomi.fi portal’s FSC service package feature enables the creation of easily manageable service groups regardless of whether they are internal or external service providers. With this feature, the services offered by the city itself and those provided by external organizations can be combined into one easily manageable entity, which can be utilized in the online service in a modular way as needed.

This project also involved the development of a technical solution to automate the publication of FSC's services and service locations in the online service. The new solution generates virtual pages for the online service that no longer require manually-generated landing pages to be created or other manual work for content management. The pages are generated from the data imported from FSC into visual entities, which can be improved by adding other content from the content management, such as news or campaign promotions, as needed.

In addition to FSC integration, the project was implemented by utilizing integrations with the Eventz event sharing platform and the Totaali platform, which transfer contact information with the online service.