Big Blue Door

Big Blue Door built hundreds of websites for the public sector, including more than a dozen flagship websites for local authorities, most using LocalGov Drupal. We are AWS Select Partners; ISO27001, ISO9001, Cyber Essentials certified; and a London Living Wage employer.

They work with a wide range of clients, including central and local government, education, charities, the NHS, emergency services, cultural organisations and the voluntary sector.

They are a full stack agency, providing services across discovery and UX, development, hosting, support, and maintenance.

Our services meet GDS Service Standards and principles.

12 Project snapshot from Big Blue door showing mobile phones with council websites.

LocalGov Drupal and Big Blue Door

If you want your council or agency to improve the lives of the people in your town, city, borough or county, there is no better way than by improving their digital access to services. We strongly believe that the quickest way to do that is by implementing LocalGov Drupal.

LocalGov Drupal is ready to go out of the box, shortening delivery timescales, simplifying implementation and saving costs. Savings for all parties are significant - why pay proprietary suppliers and be a small fish in their pond - With LGD everyone has a voice in the roadmap.

We're active members of LocalGov Drupal, working in the true spirit of a cooperative, contributing answers to queries and offering free consultancy to councils testing the water, including offering 12 months of free hosting for LocalGov Drupal sandbox sites.

As a new supplier, we’re looking forward to contributing to the framework's development in the next phase of delivery - onwards and upwards!

Many hands make light work! Pooling resources and know-how, for both agencies and councils, really is a no-brainer.

The basic needs of citizens - residents, business owners, visitors, service users - are universal.

We all want to know how to pay our council tax, when our bins are being collected, or how to complain about the monstrous extension the Joneses at no. 41 are building, so why not draw on the knowledge of over 37 other councils and decades of agency experience?

Councils can have a new platform up and running quickly and iterate in a truly agile manner.

There are a significant number of benefits to becoming part of the LocalGov Drupal community. If you are thinking about getting involved, why not join the Slack group to get a feel for things and see the passionate, knowledgeable people that are part of this movement - you won’t be disappointed.

Simon Stewart, Client Services Director, Big Blue Door

Big Blue Door and Sheffield City Council

We recently worked with Sheffield City Council to relaunch their corporate council website, and Intranet, both using LocalGov.

These projects were completed within a nine-month timeframe and included automatically migrating content from their legacy Adobe Experience Manager platform into LocalGov Drupal for both sites, using a migration script to support rerunning the process multiple times throughout delivery, ensuring only minor disruption for the content production team.

This migration process included content, documents and images from xml files and migrated approximately 2,000 pages for the public site and 1,000 pages for the Intranet.

This project involved working with a design pattern library and ensuring that all LocalGov Drupal templates were redesigned to fit within an existing design framework. LocalGov Drupal’s flexible templates proved ideal for this approach and we have continued to support a commitment to WCAG2.1 AA from an accessibility perspective.

The public site included well over 35 “campaign” sites (e.g. for this housing services campaign) which were developed by enhancing the LocalGov Drupal page-builder.

Our team managed the delivery using agile methodology and fortnightly sprints for the core development and process culminated in launching the new services in August 2022. We worked closely with Sheffield's in-house developers who were integrated with our own workflow process.

Our team supported knowledge transfer and upskilling across Drupal throughout the project.

Both sites are now hosted on an auto-scaling AWS solution with all data hosted in the London region.