Create a superior landing page for Auckland Council (Aotearoa New Zealand's largest territorial authority, serving Tāmaki Makaurau) — a ground-up redesign concept that is clearly better than the current aucklandcouncil.govt.nz homepage. The existing site is dense, dated, and bureaucratic: your version should feel like a modern, humane, distinctly Auckland civic service — fast to scan, beautiful to look at, and genuinely useful to a resident in the first five seconds.
First, study the reference: visit https://www.aucklandcouncil.govt.nz/ and its key sections (rates, rubbish and recycling, building and property, parks, venues, news) to understand the real service catalogue, information architecture, current news topics, and what the current experience gets wrong. Download reference screenshots and usable assets from the site into your workspace for study. Respect copyright and trademarks: do not reproduce Auckland Council's logo, long passages of its copy, or proprietary imagery verbatim in the final artifact. Write original copy grounded in factual public-service information (service names, fees, dates, phone numbers are facts — use them), and for photography and illustrations use the downloaded reference assets only where they are genuinely reusable, otherwise source freely licensed Auckland imagery (harbour, maunga, pōhutukawa, Sky Tower skyline, ferry terminals, west coast beaches, regional parks) or generate your own assets. Create an original wordmark and brand treatment rather than copying the council's.
Design and build a complete, believable civic landing experience, not a hero image with three cards. It should include, at a minimum, the following surfaces — all functional, all polished:
1. A hero that acts like a service desk, not a billboard: an immediate, prominent "What do you need to do?" search with real autosuggest across a local dataset of council services (pay rates, report a problem, rubbish day lookup, building consents, dog registration, venue hire, and more), plus quick-action shortcuts for the top resident tasks. Search must actually filter and navigate.
2. A genuinely useful "My Auckland" practical strip: rubbish and recycling collection day finder (working address/postcode lookup against local sample data with real results), current alerts and service notices (e.g. water restrictions, road closures, storm updates) with severity states, and local weather/tide data presented with a civic purpose.
3. A clear, visually organised services section covering the real catalogue — rates and property, rubbish and recycling, building and consents, water and environment, parks and recreation, transport and roads, community venues and events, animals and pets — each with honest, specific sub-links rather than lorem filler.
4. News, consultations, and "have your say" engagement with realistic, current-feeling Auckland content: headline stories, open public consultations with closing dates and submission calls-to-action, and upcoming events across the region.
5. Payments and online services entry points (pay a rates bill, infringement, dog registration renewal) with believable flow states, plus a "report a problem" pathway with category selection (pothole, dumped rubbish, broken streetlight, graffiti) that walks through a complete interactive flow ending in a confirmation with a reference number.
6. Strong footer and utility layer: contact channels (phone, service centres, socials), accessibility and language options, emergency information, and the expected civic links — all present and coherent.
Make it unmistakably Tāmaki Makaurau: respectful te reo Māori integration (kia ora, correct macrons in Tāmaki Makaurau, Māngere, Ōrākei and so on), a palette and visual language drawn from the harbour, whenua and pōhutukawa rather than generic government blue, and typography that feels contemporary and confident. Photography-led, generous whitespace, and an editorial sense of hierarchy — the redesign should look like a design award submission, not a CMS template.
Interaction and motion should be considered, not decorative sludge: smooth reveal transitions, hover and focus states that reward exploration, an animated but restrained hero treatment tied to place (e.g. harbour light, maunga silhouettes, subtle parallax), sticky navigation that adapts on scroll, and micro-feedback on every interactive element. Include dark-mode or day/night treatment if it strengthens the concept. All interactive flows (search, lookup, report-a-problem, payments) must run fully client-side against local data with loading, empty, success, and error states handled.
Responsive is mandatory and non-negotiable: the page must be excellent on a phone first (most residents will arrive on mobile), scaling gracefully to desktop. Meet a high accessibility bar: semantic landmarks, keyboard navigability, visible focus states, contrast, alt text, skip links.
Do not take shortcuts, do not produce a cookie-cutter government template, and do not stop at a superficial hero-plus-cards approximation of a council site. This skill imposes no token budget limit: pursue the full depth of the experience across every primary and secondary interaction, motion, feedback state, responsive breakpoint, and small detail, and keep refining until the page reads as a complete, authored, believable civic product that an Auckland resident would immediately prefer to the real site.
Deliver the finished result as a portable static website: a root `index.html` entrypoint with every supporting script, stylesheet, image, font, and data file included locally, needing no build step, package install, or server-side runtime to open.
