Sector(s)

Project Team

Team members:

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Organizations Involved

Salsa Digital worked with a federal agency to set up its new CivicTheme/GovCMS website. Using CivicTheme allowed for an extremely cost-effective and fast site build, while also delivering a visually appealing and user-tested website.

Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome)
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The agency’s challenge

A large federal government agency had multiple sites, including a public-facing website built on GovCMS Drupal 7. With Drupal 7 coming to End-of-Life, the agency needed a new GovCMS site built on Drupal 9.  Note: The agency can’t be named for security reasons.  

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The transformation — a GovCMS D9 website

Salsa Digital presented CivicTheme as a rapid build option. CivicTheme provides a high quality design system and theme that makes it fast to build websites and with much lower costs. 

The project kicked off with two short workshops, covering:

  • Brand basics — colours, font, logo
  • Visual mappings and configuration
  • Page layouts
  • Site navigation
  • Content mapping
  • Content loading strategy
  • Site search requirements
  • Webform setup

During the first week of the project, Salsa Digital also set up the base theme, sub theme and top level information architecture (IA).

Salsa Digital provided a site assembler trained in CivicTheme to populate and configure the majority of the site’s content. A runsheet was established for keeping track of the pages loaded and their relevant URLs.

Salsa Digital and our client spent a significant effort to fine tune the fonts and colours of the site to meet the agency’s brand guidelines. Regular development, testing and UAT iterations were completed to get complete satisfaction of the outcomes.

While final testing and stakeholder approval was being sought, Salsa Digital completed a major upgrade to the CivicTheme codebase to ensure that the project was running on the latest version. This stability provides a strong foundation for ongoing maintenance and improvements in the future.

Accessibility

Our accessibility expert validated the colour palette choices to ensure they met accessibility standards (WCAG 2.1). 

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The outcomes — a low-cost, visually appealing site

  • A visually appealing website built with user-tested and accessible components
  • A fast website build
  • An extremely cost-effective website build (under AU$40k)
  • The benefits of the whole-of-government platform GovCMS, including open source code (no licensing fees), access to the GovCMS community, and a highly resilient and secure platform
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Why Drupal was chosen

GovCMS was chosen as a mature, whole-of-government Drupal solution. Drupal was chosen as the preferred CMS for Australia’s Federal Government through the creation of the GovCMS platform, which was launched in 2015. GovCMS is designed to make it easier for government agencies to create modern, affordable, responsive websites. Importantly, GovCMS provides a whole-of-government platform to help consolidation across government departments. The fact that Drupal is open source means there are no expensive lock-in contracts, and GovCMS can build a Drupal/GovCMS community.

Technical Specifications

Drupal version:

Key modules/theme/distribution used:

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen
  • CivicTheme was chosen due to its flexible component-based design and ease of implementation.
  • GovCMS was chosen due to its reliable and secure platform for Australian government organisations.