LEEDS.GOV.UK

The programme

The Web Redevelopment Programme is a programme of work to review the web estate across the council. There are currently over 140 websites and we need to work on reducing this number.

What we will be doing

We will begin with migrating Leeds.gov.uk and other SharePoint sites to Drupal.  Once done we can look at:

  • moving existing, external Drupal sites to our AWS tenant
  • merging standalone sites into Leeds.gov.uk
  • redeveloping standalone sites

Once sites have been migrated we will focus on user-centred transformation and look at:

  • improving transactions
  • implementing AI search
  • adding personalisation

Why we are doing this

Most of our internal websites are on SharePoint which has been out of extended support since April 2023. 

Our stand-alone websites are externally developed and hosted. We are looking to bring these in-house and reduce the cost of these contracts to the council. Some of these websites hold similar information that is not always consistent due to lack of maintenance.

How we are doing this

We identified that it would take around 9 months to manually migrate the 1,400+ Leeds.gov.uk pages into Drupal. To drastically reduce the time and effort required, we are creating a script to scrape the web content from SharePoint and then deploying it directly to a Drupal environment. This method will be effective for most of our pages.

The programme has 2 phases:

Phase 1 - Migrate

We'll transfer the content of our sites without changing their design or structure, aiming for speed. This phase, expected to finish by year-end, focuses on moving content swiftly, especially for larger sites.

We will start by migrating a small batch of pages. This will involve running the script and then validating the pages in the test Drupal environment to make sure it is bringing over content accurately. We will then increase the number of pages until the whole site has been moved over and tested. Once testing has been completed, it will be moved over to the live environment.

Phase 2 - Transform

We'll collaborate with services and users to redesign and improve our websites and content. This phase will be user centred and include user research and content design to ensure that we align with the councils vision for customer focussed services through our web offering, putting customers at the heart of everything we do. 

What we want to achieve

Following on from migration and transformation the expected benefits are:

  • provide an improved web offering to citizens and service users
  • improve SEO for websites by having them under the main site umbrella
  • reduce costs by reducing the number of sites and not relying on external suppliers
  • upskill services and enable them to update content
  • maintain the quality of information across the sites in line with our web content standards
  • provide accessible sites in line with web content accessibility regulations

Who is involved

We have maximised our capabilities through staff augmentation to ensure a dynamic and skilled workforce. Council representatives working on the project are:

  • David – Head of Architecture and Framework Product Owner
  • Laura – Senior Project Manager
  • Ian – Technical Lead
  • Simon – Cloud Architect
  • Piyush – Principal Cloud Lead
  • Mehar – Senior Cloud Engineer
  • Phil – Solution Architect
  • Matt – Content and analytics
  • Josh – Technical Lead
  • Ben – Lead Front-End Developer
  • Thomas – Drupal Developer