Georgia Department of Community Affairs
Services
Information Architecture | UX Design
With nearly 100 programs, over a dozen departments, loads of content editors, and a large and varied mix of audiences, the Georgia Department of Community Affairs (DCA) needed digital solutions as large-scale and flexible as their organization.
The Challenge
As one of the state’s largest and most complex agencies, onboarding DCA to the State of Georgia’s GovHub platform was never going to be a small task. It would require getting many content editors and subject matter experts across various departments properly trained and on the same page.
They had amassed a repository of more than 10,000 files on their existing website, going back years. We quickly realized the older, Drupal-based CMS they’d built worked in some odd ways. Their document content type could actually contain several files within one node. So even if there were 7,000 document nodes, there could be 10,000 total documents, and we had no way of accounting for them or linking to them individually.
They developed unique content types for their needs that we needed to translate into our (also Drupal-based) GovHub CMS in a way that made sense for the agency. Over time some content editors had begun to use content types that were not appropriate for the content they were posting. This often broke the user path and disrupted uniformity across the website.
This wasn’t just a lift-and-shift job. This would require major content auditing, custom CMS content type creation, rebuilding information architecture, redesigning the entire look and feel of the site, and getting entire teams trained not just in technical CMS usage, but in content strategy and best practices.
And there was a hard deadline looming: the current site was running on Drupal 7, which was about to reach end-of-life. We’d have to stick to a tight timeline in order to get the new site up and running.
Map old CMS to new CMS
Revamp IA
Educate content editors & SMEs
The Strategy
The Results
For a more in-depth look at this project, read the deep dive in my blog post.
