Sector(s)

Team Members

antonio_zoocha, alexj12, brunopl, dabodia, gustavowal, jonathandealmeida, nathankg, nathercia, psebborn, patricia_zoocha, rafaellapinho, rhip, roberzoocha, sandrazoocha, nexusnovaz

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Organizations Involved

Zoocha worked with Newport City Council (NCC) on the redesign and development of their new LocalGov Drupal (LGD) platform. As one of the largest local authorities in Wales, NCC required a user-centred platform transformation that would meet the needs of the local community and also improve ease of use for the web team. 

Newport City Council were seeking a new platform that would provide:

  • Seamless multilingual functionality
  • Ease of use for the website management team
  • A refreshed look and feel that reflected the modern aspirations of the Council
  • Improved accessibility and usability 
     
Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome)

Key goals for the council centred around:

  • Simplifying the end user experience, with clear content structure and navigation
  • Ensuring conformance to accessibility standards to promote usability for all
  • Ability to easily manage a fully bilingual website
  • Improved integration with necessary 3rd party services

This project involved adherence to GOV.UK Design Standards, as well as genuine collaboration with the NCC team from day one. Our UX team then translated look and feel concepts from NCC into usable digital prototypes, ensuring adherence to LocalGov Drupal templates and modern digital standards.

Adopting a staggered release approach to development ensured we were able to align with the priorities of NCC, and meet the ambitious timeline. This resulted in the implementation of a proxy pass to allow both the old NCC platform and new Drupal site to exist simultaneously, with content from the old platform filtered through to the new and users redirected to the appropriate pages accordingly. 
 

Why Drupal was chosen

Drupal and in particular, the LocalGov Drupal distribution was selected by NCC in order to provide a solid and flexible foundation that would fast track the speed of delivery and prioritise the end user experience; LocalGov Drupal was essential in allowing the NCC team to meet an ambitious launch timeline.

LocalGov Drupal is an open source collaboration between UK councils and Drupal specialists like Zoocha with the aim of reducing the cost and increasing the speed and agility of local government digital publishing.

Technical Specifications

Key modules/theme/distribution used:

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen

LocalGov Drupal

Localgov has been the foundation of the website due to the widely used features and offerings that are tailored for local councils. Among these, we’ve used:

  • Services (Landing, sub-landing, page and status)
  • Guide pages
  • News and events
  • Directories
  • Alert Banners

Language & Interface Translation 

Due to the need to display content in both Welsh and English, we’ve integrated the core language and interface translation modules with Localgov to provide NCC with maximum flexibility in translation.

Workflows & Scheduled Transitions

One of the key things NCC liked about their previous CMS system was the ability to have pages in different states, with drafts and archives pages easily available. We selected these two modules to allow NCC to:

  • Have flexibility on the status of pages, both published and unpublished
  • Schedule content to be published / archived ahead of time
  • Manage different revisions of a page

Paragraphs

This module allows editors to have full control over the components on specific pages with this flexibility. This has combined components built by our team with those readily available within the LocalGov Drupal distribution.

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