Wrexham Council's old site was custom-built with no CMS capability. Their bilingual site was not WCAG 2.1 AA compliant and so failed to meet the UK Public Sector Body Website Accessibility Regulations. On top of this the content inventory for the site had become extremely bloated and was of limited use from an end user's perspective.
Our solution
We initially worked with Wrexham to help write their Business Requirements Document for their new site, identifying key user types and their goals. We then proceeded to write the resulting Functional Requirements Document (FRD) for the new site, transcribing business goals into technical requirements. Our experience with Drupal 8 meant that we could confidently recommend Drupal as a CMS that would meet all the requirements in the FRD. We researched and identified community Drupal modules that could fulfil the required functionality wherever possible, as this would reduce the cost and risk in the project. Where functionality gaps were identified we created high level specifications and estimates for the custom modules required to fill them
We worked with Wrexham using the Scrum variant of agile development, populating a backlog of tasks into our shared issue tracking system, and sorting them into themed sprints. Design prototypes were shared with Wrexham for gathering of feedback from user groups pri+D6or to implementation. We used continuous integration to ensure that functionality was deployed to a shared staging site as soon as it was deemed ‘dev done’, so that feedback could be captured at the earliest possible stage. We wrote extensive user documentation covering how to use the new site for Wrexham staff and held a series of remote handover training sessions for them. We also configured and provisioned their AWS server setup.
The result
The site is fully bilingual, supporting both English and Welsh. It was WCAG 2.1 AA compliant at the point of handover and was rated in the top 10 UK council websites for overall quality by Sitemorse.