Sector(s)

Team Members

gjangelo, vbranyik, delion, thhafner, mike.roman, DrupalKellyT

Project Team

Other team members include:

  • Gonzalo Ferrando
  • Conn McAnally
  • Michael Mertz
  • Suzie Miller
  • Rachel Minchella

Visit the site

Visit the site

Organizations Involved

  • Use: all residents to search for their property assessment history, as well as guide residents through the assessment process
  • Practice transparency
  • Old site: Custom .NET, with display and business logic tied together

The Assessor's Office is responsible for setting fair and accurate values for 1.8 million parcels of Cook County property; to administer this task, the Assessor reassesses one-third of the properties located in the county each year. The value of these properties is not determined on an individual basis, but rather by a mass appraisal system. The mass appraisal system is a way to put fairness into the entire assessment process.

In addition to working with other government agencies to stimulate economic development, job creation and the construction of affordable housing, the Assessor's Office also seeks to help county residents better understand the assessment process and take advantage of money-saving exemptions the office provides.

The old site did not allow for anyone outside of the IT staff to make even the most basic content changes. Clarity built the new website by combining the technologies of content management system Drupal 8 and .NET APIs, which easily and clearly provides a division between website content management and property data management. This combination of technologies allows the CCAO Communications team to now independently make needed, timely content updates to the site (served by the Drupal CMS) -- especially important during the Covid crisis -- while at the same time, visitors to the website can search the latest and greatest data regarding properties and assessed values for properties throughout Cook County (served by the .NET APIs).

In addition to the technical changes outlined above, Clarity created an entirely fresh design for the CCAO, emphasizing their efforts at data transparency in service to the residents of Cook County.

About the project

  • Re-branded
  • Responsive
  • Ease of content administration
  • Customized data access
  • Robust infrastructure environment
  • Increased security
  • Shared development

The Cook County Assessor’s Office inherited a very old site. In addition to its programmatic limitations, the old site no longer had consistency from a UX standpoint, and so residents had a difficult time finding the information they needed. In order for the new website to manifest the values of the Office -- Fairness, Transparency, Ethics -- the site needed a full visual overhaul. Clarity worked with the CCAO team to re-think the website from the ground up with new colors, a new logo, new navigation, and responsively designed breakpoints.

Clarity also worked with the CCAO team to ensure that they had the content administration access they needed for basic pages, documents, informational blocks, and menus. This has empowered them to make significant changes to the website on their own, which has been especially critical within just a few months of the new site launch.

Website users actively use the site to gather information about their properties through a variety of different searches. These searches are running against data that is refreshed on a daily basis. In addition to the custom Drupal modules that retrieve and send data via the .NET APIs, CCAO needed an environment and platform that could scale under pressure. As township appeal windows open up, the site sees significant spikes in traffic. Previously, the site was hosted on-premise and wasn’t constructed to scale up, so there were periodic site crashes; the new site, hosted on AWS, scales as needed under heavy loads without interruption.

Finally, the site needed to be secure, with a transparent development process that could be shared between CCAO IT staff as well as the Clarity development team. Drupal lends itself to both of those goals.

The launch of the new https://www.cookcountyassessor.com/ website at the end of January 2020 has been a success for CCAO. The site has been both robust and flexible, allowing CCAO to communicate with Cook County residents even as data and information has changed more frequently than anyone initially anticipated.

Why Drupal was chosen

  • Open source
  • Ease of integrations: 
    • Custom .NET APIs
    • Google Analytics
    • GovDelivery
    • Twitter
  • Easily shared development
  • Regular security updates
  • Flexibility to add content moving forward
  • Low cost
  • Client familiarity

CCAO was already leaning toward using Drupal to replatform its website, as it was already familiar with Drupal because of its use in other Cook County agencies. Drupal’s large developer community (and thus deep resources for future support), its facility for integrations with other systems, its regular security updates, and the demonstrated flexibility to easily add content and functionality all made for a persuasive case. 

What really sealed the deal, however, was the clear roadmap for the development of custom APIs to retrieve data from the property database. This allows for a clear separation between business logic and content management, while ensuring that the end user experience remains seamless.

Technical Specifications

Drupal version: