Haringey Council - It's All Happening

Haringey Council is one of the 32 London borough local authorities. In 2014 the council decided that it wanted to develop and update its digital presence to reflect the progression in the way that it worked and supported its residents. The Brief: Haringey Council’s initial step towards improving its digital presence was investment in the website, and particularly investment in the Content Management System (CMS). Haringey Council was looking for a new, future proofed, flexible, secure and robust CMS. The council also needed the new system to fulfil audit requirements. All UK local authorities are audited every two years and so must be careful in terms of how information is managed across all platforms. Having explored a number of options, Haringey Council decided that it wanted the new CMS to be Drupal. There were a number of reasons for this, including the ease of content management within the platform, and the fact that Drupal, as an open source CMS, does not require any license fees to operate or scale. Having decided upon the use of Drupal, Haringey Council set about looking for a partner with considerable expertise in the CMS who could assist with moving the existing council website over to Drupal, as well as a number of smaller microsites which were also using an outdated CMS. Furthermore, the partner would have to provide ongoing hosting and support for the sites, as well as be able to deliver additional functionality and implement new designs as and when required. The Solution: After a competitive tender process through G-Cloud, Haringey Council selected Ixis as its Drupal partner in March 2014. The first task involved moving the existing website portfolio from the old proprietary CMS, OpenText, to Drupal. Ixis implemented an agile project methodology to plan, manage and deliver sprints of development work to rebuild the suite of council websites using Drupal 7. Ixis used a repeatable content migration process from OpenText’s LiveLink (more recently known as “OpenText Content Suite") to Drupal, which ensured that the content migration could continue to run during the life of the project. As planned, Ixis initially moved the existing sites over to the Drupal CMS for the launch. After these initial phases of the project were completed Haringey Council maintained its relationship with Ixis on a hosting and support contract for the new Drupal sites. In addition to this, Ixis have continued to provide ad hoc development work to improve the main website, including: Rebrand and redesign - The council website had a major redesign as part of a wider re-branding exercise in 2015. Ixis worked closely with the appointed design agency to deliver the new mobile first website design to better promote self service and make it easier for residents and business to interact with the council. Accessibility improvements - Haringey Council commissioned the Royal National Institution of Blind People (RNIB) to perform an accessibility audit on its site, which comprised of two main areas. Firstly the RNIB assessed the coding, and how well this adhered to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) published by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the main international standards organization for the Internet.