Tipperary is Ireland’s sixth-largest county by area, serving nearly 170,000 people according to the 2022 Census.
The council’s old website was developed in Drupal 7 in 2014. In 20023, an upgrade and redesign was overdue to increase usability, accessibility and security. While it had been improved with new features, the upgrade path to Drupal 10 required a rebuild and provided the opportunity to improve digital services for the public.
The team at Tipperary County Council wanted their new site to deliver information quickly and concisely to more than 1 million annual users.
Why the council chose LGD
The council’s eDev team, led by Ruth Maher (IT Project Leader—eDevelopment) and Tim O’Driscoll (IT Technical Support), compiled a shopping list of features for the new site.
“We wanted to achieve the most functional, robust, yet economic public service platform we could,” says Ruth, “The ‘Open-Source’, ‘Build-to-share’ model, sharing resources, code and experience across local authorities seemed to be the best approach”.
Many of the boxes were already ticked simply by using the LGD platform. The LGD design patterns are created using best-practice, data-driven components from extensive research and based on the http://GOV.UK design system, so the infrastructure architecture has been tried and tested.
LGD runs on the latest version of Drupal and comes loaded with powerful features and functionality underpinned by lots of user research. Using the LGD theme ensured a sleek, modern website and a future-proofed development framework where councils can collaborate to create standards bigger than the sum of their parts. The code-base is continuously improved and updated, with all local authorities benefitting from contributed modules and initiatives.
“The new website provides a clean and user-friendly interface, allowing users to access the information they need quickly. This new layout, in turn, will allow Tipperary County Council to deliver information quickly and in a concise, informative manner about all the services that Tipperary has to offer,” said Ruth.
The LocalGov Drupal content and functionality are designed to meet or exceed WCAG 2.1 level AA (the current accessibility requirements for public sector websites) guidelines, so the new website is far easier to navigate for those constituents who were having trouble with the old site.
Working with Annertech
Tipperary County Council’s first port of call was Annertech, who has been spearheading LocalGov Drupal’s foray into Ireland.
After a consultation with Annertech, any worries about being the first council in Ireland to take on the LGD code base were put to rest. Annertech was appointed as consultants so Tipperary could rely on their expertise as needed.
Annertech consulted on aspects such as how LGD works and helped the council set up a basic information architecture based on the existing content types and design components available from LGD. Annertech also helped develop new features that Tipperary County Council wanted.
Challenges
Tipperary County Council's biggest challenge was creating new features. This included a quick and easy way to add all the services provided by each council. They also required the option of adding them in Irish.
This was a great opportunity for Tipperary to get Annertech’s expertise to create a module for the Irish Service Catalogue and a multilingual feature. These could then be contributed back to the LGD project.
Irish Service Catalogue module
In Ireland, the Local Government Management Agency created an online catalogue that includes all the councils' services.
The new Irish Service Catalogue module imports all the listed services for a specific council into LocalGov Drupal.
This allows councils to create their websites around the services they offer—which, as LGD user research showed, is why most users visit a council website.
Users can browse services by type or topic, which is invaluable to citizens of city or county councils.
This module has the added advantage of giving the council a jumpstart on its content. Because all the service pages have already been created, the content managers can simply edit them rather than create them all from scratch.
Adding a council's services to a site is now as easy as installing the LocalGov Irish Service Catalogue module and selecting the Local Government Management Agency Council ID.
This allows for consistency for all Councils that use this code base. The end user can simply change the domain name from something like https://carlow.ie/ to https://www.tipperarycoco.ie/ and find the items they are looking for under the same service path.
This is especially good for those living in border regions or moving from one county to another. If you know where it is on one website that is using LGD, the URL path should be the same on the other if it's filed under the Service catalogue.
Irish Language translations
Many councils need to offer services in more than one language. In Ireland, this is Irish, but in other places, such as Wales, councils may want to offer Welsh translations.
The LocalGov Multilingual module adds multilingual functionality to LocalGov Drupal sites. Although it was initially developed for Irish language capabilities, translation capabilities are also available for Welsh. Adding translations – done by certified translators – is as easy as installing the LocalGov Multilingual module.
The council's approach (team shape, costs, approach to content)
Drawing on the experience of their digital team, Tipperary County Council created its website, consulting with Annertech on the two new features (Irish language translations and integration with the Irish Services Catalogue) and any other issues they experienced while building the new site.
Because the old website was built on Drupal 7, it required a fairly large migration to the latest version of Drupal. Some content—such as some of the news items and services—was migrated as it was, but a lot of it was rewritten per the new information architecture.
Due to the volume of content that needed to be migrated, the Tipperary County Council eDev team took this as an ideal opportunity to perform an in-depth content review with all the council sections to see how their content would best fit the new Service Catalogue model.
And although the new website is up and running, the team won’t be resting on their laurels.
“We are looking forward to Phase 2 and how we can integrate microsites in the future too,” said Ruth. “LocalGov Drupal has freed up our time and budget to allow us to focus on added value services as opposed to reinventing the website code-base from scratch.”
Outcomes
Tipperary County Council’s new site, which went live in 2023, was built with LGD in just four months by the council’s own team, consulting with Annertech on new features and some aspects of the new site.
Although LGD had already been used by many councils in the UK, Tipperary County Council was the first Irish council to adopt it, so some features pertinent to Irish councils had not yet been developed.
The council could get 80% of what they wanted out-of-the-box with LGD, and then consulted Annertech for the more bespoke or complex parts of the project.
The Tipperary County Council team used part of its digital development budget to add these features (Irish language translations and integration with the Irish Services Catalogue) to the LGD project.
“From experience and consultation with various focus groups, we knew what we wanted from our new website. We fully support the concept of ‘build to share’ and ‘open source’ as being the right approach for the public sector web development. LocalGov UK provided us with the start we needed to add value and adopt the code-base for Irish Authorities,” said Ruth.
Benefits of using LGD
The new website is the perfect example of how LocalGov Drupal works in tandem with the Irish government’s latest version of its ICT strategy.
The philosophy of LocalGov Drupal perfectly reflects the thinking behind the Irish government’s Build to Share programme, a prominent feature of its recently released Connecting Government 2030 strategy.
In this strategy, the government has specified investing in infrastructure, applications and services to introduce “efficiencies through consolidation, rationalisation, digitalisation, automation and new technologies”.
“Having a single provider for such an extensive suite of services will free up valuable resources in departments and agencies, enabling them, in turn, to deliver innovative solutions tailored to their individual organisations and the needs of their particular customers,” reads the strategy document. This tied in with what Tipperary County Council wanted to achieve with its new website.
Work on the new Tipperary County Council website started in September, and it was ready to launch in January—a four-month project.
“It's exciting to be the first Irish Authority to participate in the project. We hope that we can continue to contribute to the project and allow other local authorities to take advantage of our ideas and developments,” said Ruth.