Harlow is a town in Essex, England, situated on the border with Hertfordshire and London. Although a new town, Old Harlow dates back to the early medieval age and most of its high street buildings are early Victorian. Harlow Council is responsible for delivering public services to a population of almost 90,000 citizens and the website is an essential tool for residents to access those services, such as schedule waste collection and acquire legal documentation, as well as a source of information about public life and community events.
The Harlow Council website redesign project was part of the Council's digital transformation programme to deliver accessible digital services for all citizens. Their website had been built many years earlier and had a dated, confusing design with many accessibility issues that hampered the visitor experience and lead to additional burden on call centre and council office operations. Harlow Council wanted to create seamless digital experiences across web and mobile to bring citizens more convenient, faster services and reduce the requests on their non-digital channels.
About the project
Goals & Requirements
The goals of the project included:
- Open Tender process through the GOV.UK Digital Marketplace to appoint the right partner
- Creating a user centred, mobile first redesign
- Upgrading the CMS from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8
- Migration of website content and data from legacy Platforms to new CMS (Drupal 8)
- Step Change in functionality, including the development of an Intranet for Harlow Council staff
Solution
- Solution built from users perspective, rather than a council one
- Re-design using mobile first design principles
- Flexible page layouts using the Drupal Paragraphs module
- Solution launched onto Acquia Cloud Professional service
- SSO integration with internal system
- Solr search integration
Outcomes
- the project was delivered on time and within budget
- Visits increased 30% year on year
- Increased proportion of customers using the website versus call centre for key services e.g.
- booking a bulky waste collection (up 5% since February 2019)
- reporting a missed bin (up 9% since February 2019)
- requesting a new bin (up 6% since February 2019)
- Provided a platform for future growth
Why Drupal was chosen
The Harlow Council team were familiar with Drupal but had deliberately kept the brief open regarding CMS technology, however they had specified a preference for open source. The outcome of the tender process was to select Drupal 8 because of its commitment to web accessibility in core. Using Drupal 8 meant the Council could meet the required WCAG 2.1 AA specifications out-of-the-box, saving time and budget.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
The Paragraphs module was used to enable the Harlow Council team to create different content experience depending on the context and objective of each page and section of the website.
