Service delivery: Haringey council’s new website hits all the right notes
Haringey Council’s residents love their new LocalGov Drupal website, which puts the users first and ensures that their needs are met.
Project background
Haringey is a London Borough Council serving a population of over 262,000 people. Its website was more than seven years old and wasn’t serving the needs of all its citizens as best it could be. For example, it wasn't designed for mobile phone users, and it also wasn’t as accessible as it could be for people with disabilities.
The council needed a website that was based on best practices around usability and accessibility and followed Government Digital Service standards.
The new website was built on LocalGov Drupal, the Drupal-based CMS built for councils by councils.
The project was a partnership between Annertech, who designed and developed the website, and Invuse, who conducted user research.
“We are thrilled with our new website, which looks great, and is both accessible and user friendly. The feedback from our users has been positive, with many commenting that the site is quick and simple to use, and it's so easy to find the information they're looking for. ”
– Paul Barnett, Digital Content and Development Manager, London Borough of Haringey Council
Challenges
Although we’ve completed several LocalGov Drupal websites, no two projects are the same and the Haringey project faced a few challenges.
Content
For a relatively small council, the Haringey London Borough Council had a massive amount of content – approximately 3,000 pages needed to be migrated or rewritten.
Website editors
The Haringey website had more than 100 editors. Not all of them actively used the system, but all who would use it needed training.
Integrations
The website required a number of integrations, including with the management tool Modern.Gov and a custom API to work with the My Haringey iShare system: a self service system used by a number of councils in the UK.
Our approach
Content
The content migration was a massive undertaking. The content wasn’t just being moved over – it was restructured, rewritten and improved according to the residents’ needs. This process took place section by section over the course of a year.
Even when the home page went live on LocalGov Drupal, content migration was still ongoing.
Website editors
Because so many people needed access to the website we implemented access control measures. This allows people to only have access to pages they’re allowed to access.
This workflow may be a little more complex, but it ensures that website content is controlled accordingly.
Integrations
The various systems were integrated so that users can seamlessly access their My Haringey accounts to get the information they need, as well as the council data system that gives them ward data and councillor information.
On a larger scale, the complete news section of the Haringey website is populated from a third-party news management tool called Onclusive.
LocalGov Drupal pulls new and updated articles, media objects and other assets so that the team working on this content doesn’t have to enter it twice.
The news section of the Haringey website is populated from Onclusive, so the content team only has to create the posts once.
In a similar fashion to the news section of the website, the Haringey Learns team are able to continue to use their course management system (LearnerTrack) and the LGD site imports and indexes of occurrences of courses so that residents can search, browse and sign-up from the main website.
The number of places, costs, dates and other important information is updated every 15 minutes.
The Haringey website imports and indexes courses from LearnerTrack, updating data every 15 minutes.
New features
Haringey funded an update to the guide navigation for LocalGov Drupal. This is for groups of content called guides that work together to present pages in a structured way in LocalGov Drupal. It’s a great way for councils to break up information and present it in bite-sized chunks.
The new guide navigation has allowed large chunks of information to be broken up into easily navigatable sizes, such as with Haringey’s information on tax discounts, reductions and exemptions.
This was made available for all councils, and has proven to be a very popular addition to LocalGov Drupal.
In addition, all the general bug fixes and tweaks that were made all through the life of the project were added to the LocalGov Drupal base theme and so were all the modules that were used by Haringey. This will benefit all the councils who use LocalGov Drupal.
“The expertise of the Annertech team (and Mike in particular) was invaluable to the success of this project, and their ability to identify and solve any challenges quickly meant that the entire project was streamlined and very easy to manage. Would highly recommend to anyone considering a new Local Gov or Drupal website.”
– Paul Barnett, Digital Content and Development Manager, London Borough of Haringey Council
Results
Haringey’s new website not only looks great, but it has been thoroughly user-tested to ensure it is easy to use, and gives the users what they want, when they want it.
LocalGov Drupal is WCAG 2.2 AA compliant out of the box and the new website is easier to navigate, more accessible for people with disabilities and works better on mobile devices.
The website scores 100% for accessibility on PageSpeed Insights.
It also scored 96% for performance on PageSpeed Insights, which is based on the website’s Core Web Vitals.
Haringey’s digital content team reports an increase in customer satisfaction and a decrease in the time it takes people to carry out key tasks on the site.
Key numbers
