Zoocha

Their development and support services are ISO 27001, ISO 9001 and Cyber Essentials Plus certified, and they are members of the National Cyber Security Centre CiSP programme.

Alongside various in-house disciplines, including UX, design, hosting, and digital strategy, Zoocha offers the largest Acquia-certified Drupal development and support team based in the UK.

Zoocha and LocalGov Drupal

The Zoocha team are actively engaged in the Drupal and LocalGov Drupal communities, contributing financial support, patches, feature enhancements and fixes, including to Drupal Core itself.

Due to the collaborative nature of the community that genuinely cares for the growth of Drupal, Zoocha has been able to attract great developer talent to our team. Our clients have also benefited from this community by being able to leverage the developments made, facilitating greater flexibility in development and targeted solutions.

LocalGov Drupal specifically has provided our clients with a reliably accessible and secure framework to develop their digital presence whilst being assured that development prioritises user needs.

The ability to promote the ease of publishing and resolve commonly encountered issues that local authorities face was something that Zoocha were particularly interested in during our early stages of involvement in LocalGov Drupal.

We were excited by the opportunity to enable smaller councils to benefit from a larger digital investment. Our team has always recognised the importance of accessibility from design to development and beyond, as this priority was reflected in the LocalGov initiative, we were keen to get involved.

Zoocha maintains a people-first culture, prioritising the well-being of our team and this is reflected in our work with our clients in the LGD community and beyond. We look forward to continuing to grow the LGD community and helping councils benefit from it.

Transparency and planning have been key in our involvement with LGD. We aim to work as an extension of the local councils we work with to ensure that LGD can meet their expectations and needs, jointly mapping solutions in effective cross-team collaboration. Be prepared to be open and collaborative with the councils and other suppliers that are part of the LGD community and contribute to growing the platform.

Will Huggins, CEO, Zoocha

Westminster City Council Project

Zoocha worked with Westminster City Council on redesigning and developing their platform using LocalGov Drupal. With a keen focus on accessibility and seamless user journeys, we were able to make the most of the core LGD features out of the box.

Several features were extended to meet the unique needs of the council and have been contributed back to the distribution. LGD provided our team with the perfect launchpad to dive into development, reducing the resources and timeline dedicated to meeting an ambitious launch date set by the council.

Fantastic results

The work that Zoocha carried out on the WCC resulted in a 20% decrease in page loading time and an 18% drop in users visiting the ‘Contact Us’ form, suggesting users have benefited from the well-researched and evidence-led design of the distribution.

We contributed to several bug fixes as part of our Westminster City Council (WCC) project. These include the 'Guide contents block shouldn't show unpublished guide pages' bug and the 'Guides Abstract Base Blocks throw an error in preview mode'. These bug fixes that Zoocha contributed to have been an extremely valuable asset to the WCC site and have prevented such issues from appearing in the future. Within the WCC project, we also overhauled the LocalGov guides navigation system to make it applicable and themable to a broader set of content types.

Other council projects

Following the launch of the WCC project, Zoocha were able to reuse the code in order to successfully launch the neighbouring Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea platform.

We have also worked with: