Sector(s)
Team Members
Iowa's state agency websites receive 32 million visitors annually. However, these sites lacked consistent branding, navigation, features, and centralized governance, resulting in stale and redundant content that hindered the user experience.
To address these issues, Lullabot reorganized the agency websites and migrated them to a unified Drupal platform. This new platform enhances the editorial experience, ensures consistent branding, provides agencies with greater flexibility, and resolves major accessibility concerns.
A simplified and powerful editorial experience
We prioritized the needs of content authors and public information officers, ensuring the new platform accommodates various team sizes and experience levels. The system empowers staff to automate and embed content while adhering to design and accessibility standards. Additionally, we standardized the insertion of videos, visualizations, and tables to meet agency requirements and enhance security.
Back to topA Scalable, Flexible Design System
We expanded Iowa’s color palette to offer agencies more customization options while maintaining accessibility and branding. Visual documentation provides editors with patterns and sample layouts, ensuring consistency and reinforcing trust in agency websites.
A Gradual, Customized Migration
We migrated the state’s agency websites in groups, using both automated processes and manual entry. Each site underwent a comprehensive content audit and received a migration plan that worked best while identifying content gaps, redundancies, and outdated PDFs to maximize impact at launch.
Back to topEnhanced Performance and Security
Previously, agency websites were hosted with multiple providers, leading to maintenance issues, slow loading times, and outages. We conducted a needs analysis and recommended a new hosting solution. The unified platform on Pantheon features isolated instances for each site, enabling rapid launches and easy code updates, resulting in improved stability and security.
Back to topMeasurable improvements
The state set metrics for improvement, aiming for a 30% reduction in stale content and an accessibility score of 83 or higher. Every site on the new platform meets or exceeds these KPIs, with some eliminating over 90% of content and achieving high 90s in accessibility scores.
Many authors were already familiar with Drupal. The state also looked at Georgia and Massachusetts, saw their success on Drupal, and wanted to follow a proven path.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Config Pages: used to allow agencies to configure their sites in a user-friendly way, and to separate settings owned by agencies and those owned by the central team (which are regular Drupal config).
Entity Embed: This module allowed us to provide a set of content types that could be embedded as components inside basic pages. We called these “micro-content types,” and they were used for embedding accordions, promos, and other content types into basic pages.
Block Field: This module is the secret sauce of listing pages, our editors’ way of creating listings of content. By referencing a view block display in a field, with some predefined views and some custom code, we allow editors to override some views behaviors for having lots of power on views while avoiding exposing them to the views UI or having to grant editors access to it.
