Sector(s)
Team Members
Southwark Council needed a website that made a broad range of public services easier to find, understand and maintain. Big Blue Door worked with the Council on discovery, user experience, design, content and development, replacing its proprietary platform with LocalGov Drupal. The main website launched on 15 October 2024.
The relationship has since grown into a continuing programme of digital delivery. A separate LocalGov Drupal Microsites platform supports Perfect Day Southwark, the Council’s ceremony website, and the SEND Local Offer for children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities and those who support them. Big Blue Door provides design and build services, hosting, support, maintenance and ongoing development across this expanding estate.
Business case and background
For a local authority, a website is an essential route to everyday services. Residents need to arrange waste collections, understand housing support, pay Council Tax and find reliable information without first understanding how the Council is organised. Staff need to keep that information accurate as services and policies change.
Southwark’s ageing proprietary CMS made this harder. Its limited flexibility and awkward publishing processes constrained the Council’s ability to improve the experience. The business case was therefore broader than a visual refresh: Southwark wanted a more adaptable platform, clearer content, better navigation and a sustainable approach to maintaining a large public-service website.
Working with Big Blue Door, the Council combined technical replacement with user research and substantial content redesign. Moving to LocalGov Drupal also offered a way to benefit from improvements shared across local government, reducing the need to commission every common requirement individually.
Specialist services brought a related challenge. A ceremony website and a SEND information service have different audiences, content and visual requirements. The Microsites platform allowed Southwark to give these services appropriate identities while reusing a maintained Drupal foundation, rather than establishing an entirely separate technical solution for each new website.
About the project
Research and content shaped the main website
The programme began in 2023 with discovery and design. Big Blue Door combined analytics and stakeholder input with resident research, including six stakeholder workshops, five resident interviews, three card-sorting exercises and usability testing involving 28 participants. This work informed the information architecture, navigation and interface, grounding decisions in how people looked for services.
Content transformation ran alongside development. A team of five content designers rewrote and restructured material, using plain language and GDS-style guidance. Peer review and service-owner review helped check clarity and accuracy. Content ownership and review reminders supported the longer-term task of keeping information current.
A council-specific experience on shared foundations
Big Blue Door created a responsive Figma design system and implemented it through themed LocalGov Drupal templates and more than 20 reusable Paragraphs components. Established content patterns supported service pages, guides, step-by-step information, directories, news and events, while specialist listings addressed needs such as new council homes and properties to let.
Accessibility was a requirement throughout design and development, with WCAG 2.2 AA informing the work and accessibility testing forming part of delivery. The resulting design system was published openly for the wider community to use. The current homepage combines prominent search and popular tasks with service navigation, news and a “Where I live” postcode entry point for local information.
Extending the platform to specialist services
Perfect Day Southwark followed in November 2024 on the LocalGov Drupal Microsites platform delivered by Big Blue Door. Its venue-led experience helps couples explore ceremony settings, view photography and find practical information. Big Blue Door developed the shared platform and implemented the website, with the site’s visual design credited to Studio Parallel.
The SEND Local Offer launched on 20 August 2026, reusing that Microsites foundation. Building on research commissioned by the Council, Big Blue Door delivered the design and build for a service organised around families’ needs. Visitors can start by age group or subject, find support for parents and carers, explore local groups and activities, and access news and events. The website serves people aged 0–25 with SEND and those supporting them.
Both microsites receive hosting and support from Big Blue Door. Their contrasting purposes demonstrate how a shared distribution can accommodate different audiences and visual approaches.
Delivery continues after launch
Big Blue Door and Southwark continue to develop the websites through an agile partnership. A shared backlog, agreed requirements, sprint planning, demonstrations and review help the teams prioritise improvements. Testing, peer review and controlled releases support delivery, while retrospectives help refine how the teams work together. Hosting, maintenance and security updates sit alongside this continuing development programme.
The outcome is a main council website and two specialist websites supported through an ongoing relationship. Southwark has replaced an inflexible legacy CMS, introduced clearer service content and reusable publishing patterns, and extended its open-source investment to new services. AWS hosting supports the main website’s operation; the July 2026 account review reported more than 99.99% uptime over the preceding six months. The expanding microsites estate provides a further concrete result: the foundation established for one service has already been reused to deliver another.
Why Drupal was chosen
Southwark’s decision centred on moving beyond the constraints of its existing proprietary CMS. LocalGov Drupal offered an open-source platform shaped around the requirements of councils, with established patterns for service information, guides, directories, news and events. These provided a practical starting point for Southwark’s needs while leaving room for distinctive design and additional functionality.
For editors, Drupal’s structured content and reusable components supported consistent publishing across a large website. Big Blue Door could combine these with Southwark’s content ownership and review processes, helping staff maintain information beyond the initial migration. Drupal’s flexibility also supported connections to existing services, including Cludo search, Microsoft Azure single sign-on, Google Translate and ModernGov.
The choice supported a broader approach to reuse. Southwark could participate in the LocalGov Drupal community and build on shared work, while Big Blue Door developed a design system tailored to the Council’s identity. Publishing that design system openly made the design work available to others too.
For specialist websites, LocalGov Drupal Microsites provided a complementary distribution. Perfect Day and the SEND Local Offer share a microsites codebase while retaining their own domains, presentation and content. This made it possible to extend the Council’s investment to new audiences without requiring each site to start from scratch. Together, the two distributions offered an appropriate balance of common foundations, editorial control and service-specific flexibility.
Technical Specifications
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