Sector(s)
Team Members
The National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE) supports universities to develop high-quality public engagement. Its website serves researchers, professional staff and others looking for practical guidance, examples and specialist support.
Following a successful public tender, Big Blue Door became NCCPE’s digital partner in 2022. The project combined discovery, information architecture, user experience and visual design, Drupal development, content preparation, training and testing. The rebuilt website launched in November 2023 on Drupal 10.
Big Blue Door worked closely with NCCPE’s team throughout delivery and continues to provide hosting, maintenance, support and development. The result is both a public knowledge resource and a practical publishing platform for the organisation behind it.
Business case and background
NCCPE’s website needed to support two closely connected purposes: sharing knowledge about public engagement and making the organisation’s own services easier to discover. Visitors needed routes into an extensive collection of guidance, while NCCPE needed space to communicate its consultancy, training and other activities.
Over time, the previous website had accumulated hundreds of subpages. Its crowded dropdown navigation made the collection difficult to explore, and long passages of relatively undifferentiated text made useful information harder to scan. The project also provided an opportunity to move away from Drupal 7 and establish a maintainable foundation for future publishing.
Big Blue Door joined after NCCPE had already undertaken substantial scoping. Early stakeholder workshops brought together existing audience knowledge, frustrations with the website and expectations for its replacement. This helped translate organisational priorities into decisions about navigation, page structure and content presentation.
The business case extended beyond a visual refresh: NCCPE needed a website that helped people use its expertise, made its services more visible and gave its team the tools to keep information relevant as its work evolved.
About the project
Designing around a substantial knowledge collection
The central goal was to make NCCPE’s knowledge easier to find and use. Big Blue Door replaced the previous expansive dropdown navigation with a more compact, two-level approach. The design also gave greater prominence to services, news and opportunities, helping visitors understand both what NCCPE knows and how it can help them.
Wireframes allowed the teams to review page structure before moving into detailed prototypes. Alongside the navigation work, Big Blue Door developed a set of components for presenting complex content in smaller sections. An expanded palette of shades from NCCPE’s existing brand supported different content backgrounds, while quotations, images, video and highlighted information added variety and emphasis. Resource pages gained tools such as in-page navigation and related content to help readers explore further.
Testing ideas, then testing the working website
User research informed delivery at two distinct stages. In April 2023, Big Blue Door conducted six moderated prototype sessions with participants drawn mainly from the public engagement profession. All six located consultancy information immediately under “Our services”, supporting a key objective of the redesign. Testing also highlighted questions about labels, the position of case studies and the visibility of related resources.
In September 2023, five new participants tested the built website in a private environment. This enabled the team to assess working search, listing filters and contact journeys as well as the design. All five found consultancy and training information quickly and completed the contact form without significant difficulty. Feedback also identified areas needing attention, including filtering behaviour and the clarity of some content.
These were small qualitative studies, used to guide decisions and identify problems before launch. They provided evidence about specific journeys rather than a claim of universal usability or a measurement of live-site conversion.
Supporting content creation and iterative delivery
Big Blue Door used a phased, collaborative approach with regular project reviews and shared task management. Work progressed through discovery, wireframes, prototypes, development, content preparation and pre-launch testing. The schedule accommodated NCCPE’s team and its parallel responsibility for preparing the new content.
The private development website let NCCPE begin creating and transferring content while implementation continued. Training and practical examples helped editors learn how to use the components with their own material. By July 2023, delivered work included single- and double-column page options, multi-select tags, editorial roles and workflow, and improvements to resource components. Webform migration was also substantially complete.
Client feedback and testing informed successive changes. The teams distinguished launch priorities from later development, and the demo environment provided a place to review work before it reached the public website. Following launch in November 2023, this environment continued to support testing and content experimentation.
Outcome and continuing partnership
NCCPE gained a Drupal 10 website with clearer routes into its knowledge collection, more visible services and a broader set of publishing tools. Big Blue Door’s work addressed the limitations of the old navigation and text-heavy layouts while supporting a more adaptable editorial process.
The strongest measured evidence comes from the pre-launch task testing: participants could find important service information and successfully use the contact journey. The continuing live website demonstrates the platform’s role in publishing resources, promoting activities and supporting NCCPE’s work. Big Blue Door continues to provide hosting, maintenance, support and development, allowing the website to evolve beyond the initial rebuild.
Why Drupal was chosen
Drupal provided continuity with NCCPE’s existing platform while allowing Big Blue Door to rethink how its content was structured and presented. Moving from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10 created the opportunity to replace the old publishing experience with a more flexible implementation suited to a substantial knowledge collection.
Structured content was central to that fit. NCCPE publishes different kinds of resources alongside news, events and service information. Drupal’s content modelling and taxonomy capabilities supported these distinctions, giving the team consistent ways to describe material and connect it with relevant topics. Search and filtering provided further routes into the collection beyond the main navigation.
For editors, Big Blue Door implemented reusable page components using Paragraphs. The team could combine text, imagery, quotations, video and related content, with layout options suited to different page types. This made it possible to present detailed material in manageable sections while retaining a coherent design. Webforms could be included within pages, and Content Admin and Content Editor roles supported the associated editorial workflow.
Drupal therefore addressed both sides of the brief: helping visitors navigate a varied body of information and giving NCCPE greater control over its presentation. Combined with Big Blue Door’s ongoing maintenance and development, it also provided a foundation that could continue to evolve after launch.
Technical Specifications
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