The DNA of a user-centred local authority Drupal website built for Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council

Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council is the local authority for Dun Laoghaire Rathdown county, delivering high quality services and infrastructure for its population including local parks, sports and leisure services, housing, libraries, arts and cultural activities, planning, economic development, local tourism, environment and waste management.

Making a strategic decision to move away from the large number of disparate web platforms that had been developed by both the internal team and a mix of external providers, the dlr IT team selected Drupal as their platform on which to build the next generation of DLR websites and internal intranet. The goal was set to build a user-centred and easily managed, responsive, public service website to better showcase and promote the wide range of services and activities offered to DLR residents, visitors and businesses, and to establish a SSO framework and architecture for future distributed content publishing. 

The session will be presented by Daniel Alb, UX/UI Design Lead and Harsh Sharma, Drupal Tech Lead at Monsoon Consulting - one of the leading Drupal Agencies in Dublin. They will discuss design and development insights from the recent build of dlrcoco.ie website including these topics:

• Content strategy & Information Architecture of local authority platform
• Citizen-first UX approach in building a government website 
• From text heavy to image heavy: Challenges in working with image rich content
• Taxonomies, Organic groups, Dynamic Content Display, solr search. Content publication workflow, Action flags
• "That text is too long": Multilingual challenges 
• SSO with Bakery: content publishing across multiple Drupal websites
• Ready for future: Multisite, Integrations and future development

The session is addressed to:

• Content managers working with Drupal or looking to adopt Drupal as their content publishing platform
• Drupal agencies looking to understand best practices in implementing local authority Drupal websites
• Developers building enterprise level platforms on Drupal

About the presenters

Daniel Alb is UX/UI Design Lead at Monsoon Consulting. His focus is to deliver clients with functional user centred designs for web, software, mobile and ecommerce applications. Daniel has over 15 years experience on all sides of a software product, from branding and visual design to user experience, user interface and interaction. Daniel has worked with clients from multiple business verticals including health, food, lifestyle and local government, and has spoken at different events & meetups in Ireland.

Harsh Sharma is Drupal Tech Lead at Monsoon Consulting, and on a day-to-day he is involved in translating project requirements and feature documentation into a Drupal Solution architecture. He has extensive experience in Drupal Configuration, Custom Module Development, 3rd party Web Services and API integrations. Harsh was part of the project technical discovery, actively defining the scope and requirements surrounding the project and acting as a project Tech Lead defining the tech architecture and setting project development best practices.