Sector(s)

Team Members

emkay, markconroy, petr illek, wigglykoala

Project Team

Annertech

Annertech is one of Europe's leading open-source digital agencies. Founded in 2008, we have grown to become not just the "go to" Drupal experts in Ireland but right across Europe, working with a range of clients in both the private and public sectors.

Our mission is to help companies to embrace open-source technology to deliver ambitious digital experiences for their customers. Our philosophy is to never hoard our knowledge, but share it – with clients, partners and the open-source community.

Our clients include: Glanbia, Dublin City Council, National Gallery of Ireland, Folens Publishing, Irish Cancer Society and Oxfam Ireland.

Invuse

Invuse is a UX specialist agency based in the UK. They combine their knowledge of accessibility, user research and content best practice to ensure that your LGD website supports key user journeys and provides an exceptional user-first experience. 

Invuse Ltd team members
  • Ryan Taylor
  • Leila Dewhurst

Visit the site

Visit the site

Organizations Involved

Community contributions

The development of this website led to the contribution of many patches to the LocalGov Drupal (LGD) distribution. Given that the Annertech team took the lead in developing the base theme for LGD, many of the patches and improvements were for the frontend system.

Many of these took the form of more variables for frontenders, so the subtheme system for LGD will be even easier to use, as well as small fixes such as header.js breaking if there were no blocks in the header.

Redcar and Cleveland Borough Council (RCBC) is located in north east Yorkshire in the United Kingdom and provides government services and civic responsibilities to about 150,000 residents. Its online presence needed to be updated, modernised and made accessible.

RCBC knew that the old publishing platform (based on Sharepoint) was limiting in terms of its design and content management. It was also inflexible, and evidently was affecting the accessibility of the information.

Security and privacy was an increasing concern – the council had experienced a cyber attack in 2020, and needed to ensure that the site and the data they collected was secure.

RCBC knew that it needed to change its website from the ground up. Annertech was chosen, alongside our UX partners, Invuse, to create a new website for the council using LocalGov Drupal (LGD).

About the project

Challenges to overcome:

  • The original website was completely inaccessible; both in terms of functionality and content
  • A large proportion of the negative user experience was due to the structure and information architecture of the site, with many users feeling that they went round in circles
  • Search was unable to deliver the relevant results
  • There are a high number of stakeholders, which meant that the discovery and strategy phase needed to be extensive to ensure all stakeholders felt they had input on the feedback
  • The terminology and language used throughout the website needed modernising to help residents efficiently find relevant information, by using the language of users rather than reflecting internal dialogue
  • Certain pages and areas of the site delivered error messages.

Outcome:

  • In less than nine months, we were able to provide a modern and user-first website based on the LGD distribution which reflected the identity of RCBC
  • We brought RCBC’s website and content up to Government Digital Service (GDS) standards for accessibility, facilitating WCAG 2.1 AA compliance
  • The new LGD website is now running at a high performance, loads content faster and – crucially to RCBC’s users – is mobile-responsive
  • Our user research and stakeholder engagement approach, led by Invuse, ensured that RCBC’s new website prioritised a functional, flexible and user-friendly experience
  • We supplied RCBC’s team a further 30 days support for any questions or assistance that was required
  • We also continue to provide cloud-based hosting as part of our solution.

Testimonial

“Working with the teams involved has been incredible. Their passion and buy-in with our vision was what made the whole journey, from procurement to delivery, completely seamless. The transparency and communication back to our team is why we have been able to launch a successful and efficient resident-focussed platform.“

- Anthony Tyreman, Redcar & Cleveland Borough Council 

Why Drupal was chosen

As mentioned, RCBC had used SharePoint for its website for a number of years, and realised that it was cumbersome and had limitations. 

LocalGov Drupal was becoming quite popular among UK councils, and it ticked all the boxes on Redcar and Cleveland’s wishlist – it employs the latest technology; would ensure the website would meet all WCAG 2.1 AA compliance guidelines; it would provide easy access to information for the residents, partners and stakeholders, while it would accelerate the council’s digital transformation journey.

An added bonus was that, because many councils had pooled their resources to create the code already, all the features that RCBC would need had already been developed. 

This meant that the process would be a lot quicker and smoother than starting from scratch, and would cost significantly less than going it alone. 

No matter what the size of your council, your citizens have the same needs from your website: information about services provided, alerts about road closures, etc. 

LocalGov Drupal, as a free and open source distribution, levels the playing field, ensuring that no council needs to have an inferior website due to not having a budget as large as another council. Whether you are a small council in rural Ireland or a city council in London, LGD ensures you have a full suite of features for your website.

Having suffered a cyber attack in recent years, security was a major concern for the RCBC team. Drupal’s credibility as a very secure and highly monitored platform (thanks Drupal Security Team!!!), it made Drupal the most obvious choice amongst the open source CMS options. 

Being built on Drupal 9 means that the platform benefits from the most secure version of Drupal available. The technical group of LocalGov Drupal ensures that the codebase is always kept up-to-date with the latest Drupal releases.

Technical Specifications

Drupal version:

Key modules/theme/distribution used:

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen

LocalGov Drupal is a distribution and install profile built to help UK councils publish public facing websites quicker, cheaper and better, by standardizing the feature set for all councils. As its motto says, it’s built “by councils, for councils”. This made it the ideal choice for the Redcar & Cleveland Borough Council website.