Sector(s)

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Visit the site

The Bureau of Land Management was established in 1946, but its roots go back to the years after America’s independence when the young nation began acquiring additional lands. At first, these lands were used to encourage homesteading and westward migration. The General Land Office was created in 1812 to support this national goal. Over time, values and attitudes regarding public lands shifted, and President Harry S. Truman, by means of a government reorganization, merged the GLO and another agency, the U.S. Grazing Service, creating the BLM.

For the new redesign, BLM needed a responsive website that showcased BLM’s efforts for preserving America’s beauty and natural resources. Harnessing the use of social media, BLM needed a website that integrated with current social media accounts to reduce the time required to post updates while encouraging readers to stay connected with BLM.

About the project

Before any development began, Fig Leaf Software reviewed the designs, interactivity, and 508 compliance with the BLM team and captured UI/UX revisions prior to new site development. Section 508 web compliance was tested throughout the site using web tools checking for accessibility issues including color contrast, links, and structural elements.

Fig Leaf Software delivered a fully responsive website that incorporates the vision of the BLM. The new public website provides information to site visitors and conveys BLM’s ongoing efforts to maintain and preserve of one of America’s greatest natural resources. The newly designed Drupal content managed site features:

-Responsive design with multi-level mobile menu
-Photo-rich home and landing pages to draw interest and spotlight BLM’s influence on the environment
-Contributor/editor sectioning for allowing specific regional, state or local offices to control content
-Bulk data import of existing content for less manual entry efforts
-Flexible layouts using Drupal’s Panels module for flexible and fresh content pages
-Integration with multiple Social Media services to spotlight community involvement per office

Why Drupal was chosen

The Bureau of Land Management selected Fig Leaf to design a new user experience for the agency and implement the Drupal Content Management System (CMS). Fig Leaf and worked with BLM contractors and design team members to create a unique look that would capture the layout and flexibility of the agency’s vision with an easy-to-use content management solution. BLM desired to leverage the agency’s vast amount of high-quality photography on the website to reflect the beauty of the country that BLM strives to protect. With the continuing increase of mobile users, a website that was fully responsive and accessible to all users was important. BLM uses social media to inform the public of issues and keep citizens abreast of the latest topics facing the environment. With regional, state, and local offices throughout the country, there was a need to segregate content from being modified by other offices.

Technical Specifications

Drupal version:

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen

FlexSlider was used to provide an easily configurable slider to home pages.

Since slider images are very large in both dimension and disk size, the Picture module was used to provide several different image sizes for different screen sizes. This was especially useful when the slider is displayed on mobile devices, where large images should not be downloaded.

The Manual Crop module gives site admins and editors the ability to crop their images at the different sizes provided by Picture, directly in the editor. This is useful when autocropping does not produce the desired results.

Each slider could contain dozens of images so multi-upload is crucial. The Media, File Entity and Plupload modules were used to add fields to images and allows for multi file uploads using drag-and-drop.