 Well, hello earthlings greetings. Hello. You all look really excited to be here Pretty I appreciate that. I appreciate the fist pump in the back I'm sorry if you've ever experienced what I do it talks, but it's not like the thing where someone's really boring So if you're looking for that, you should just save yourself trouble and leave now Ron likes jokes Just what happens anyway, I'm Ron Bronson. This is Charles Brandt Hi We're here from the Bollington, Indiana City of Bloomington. Charles still works there. I don't we'll get into that later though Not really We didn't fight it was totally amicable But at any rate we out launched our website a couple months ago moved it from an in-house C mess of Drupal We're gonna talk to you a little bit about that and hopefully after you have a million questions for us about what you're working on And how we can help you save yourself some time in trouble or about what we did or whatever Sound great All right, I'll take that as enthusiasm Charles tell them about yourself Charles So I'm from the city of Bloomington in Indiana I always like to specify because there are many cities of Bloomington Across the country, but we happen to be the one in Indiana That's the home of Indiana University. So we are a pretty small College town so I think when students are there. We're about 80,000 When the students leave in the summer and we go down to about 40,000 so not a real big city, but We are fortunate in that we have a small team of Developers in-house that let us take on projects like migrating our city's website to Drupal. So We have a number of open-source projects that we make available on our city's github page and We are always eager to share Share what we've learned and what we've done with other cities so Absolutely reach out to us and let us know Charles. What'd you do before you got to the city of Bloomington? This is about you I've been a developer for quite some time working with Python and PHP and JavaScript and I've just been very happy to be working at my municipal government Developing open-source software so Cool, what about you Ron? I'm Ron Bronson. I currently work for the federal government's digital agency 18f I used to work for the state of Bloomington before that before that I did a lot of other things sort of all over the place state universities working sort of at the intersection of of UX and Content strategy and digital and whatever else. I've been working on the web for a long time, too Yeah, I still live in Bloomington Google me so Today we're gonna talk to you a little bit about our redesign and kind of how this all went down It's a sort of a laborious process, but an exciting one in a sense like Charles said the cool thing about the state of Bloomington's Web team is that means for a city of our size it punches really above its weight in terms of contributing to open source In terms of being able to develop early co-op locations. I mean, there's a million things the city's done Like I said again again compared to its size and in Launching's website was one of those gargantuan things and so We're gonna talk to you today if you did like I said with one slide where if nothing else if you're like Ah, you know what that Bronson guy a little too much or whatever else nothing else you find out what we did and you can Leave but don't We went from an in-house CMS to Drupal 8 and you're like we didn't go to 7 we'll explain why in a second We got rid of initially when we launched the site We went from several thousand pages of content to five hundred. I Know I know what you're thinking who let you do that and why do you have still jobs? Maybe that's why Ron left No, that's not why We'll get into why we did that and how we were able to do that It throughout this process And we also the also thing we do which is really wild and people are always horrified about is that we went from a Site that allowed people to edit content by department. So if you're in transportation you edit transportation pages if you're in The mayor's office you can edit everything if you're in you actually you couldn't but you know You can only edit those pages that were assigned to your department on the new launch Everyone in the city who has access to the website can edit any page on the website except for the front page and Yet no one's abused that power and been fired for doing so yet I know again you're horrified by this But we'll tell you why we did it and why that worked for us and the last thing of course It's talking a little bit about some of the content strategy behind what we did in Changing our thinking about how we structured the site from a site that was more organizational and focused on our org chart and Went towards a structure that was more contextual and focused more on the way people actually search websites and how that benefited us And so with that chart Charles is going to start you off Yes, so a screenshot of our older site again, we Apparently didn't quite get the message that the number one no-no when you think about launching a website is I I've got an idea. I'll make my own content management system Don't do that Everybody here I'm sure can agree with that and so but we did and that's what we we ran with On our site For about ten years so Yeah, we we had our in-house CMS and as Ron said Without our previous iteration what we did was every department had their own content and that was Our way of enforcing that only people with the right permissions would be able to edit that content but in practice At least at our our city organization Content doesn't really fit in a specific department all the time So there's often a lot of crossover from one department to another where Somebody in planning and transportation will need to edit a page that's shared with our public works department And and that's just the way content is I think in most organizations. So that type of structure of enforcing Ownership across or within a department is very brittle and it ends up causing a lot of requests to hey, I need I need permission to edit this page and then Somebody else needs permission to edit that page and it's a it's a back-and-forth thing. So I Don't recommend it after after our experience Another thing as you saw in that that previous slide our old site was not responsive. We actually had developed a separate mobile Version of our website that only showed on mobile devices and As you can see in the fine print there in our Google analytics the third most popular page on our site was I Really want to view the full site so that that mobile that separate mobile page was was not a good approach for us and So our goal with the new site was something a little bit more responsive Maintain it in one CMS and make sure that it works across all devices So I'll turn it over to Ron here. Cool. So I showed up to say Bloomington God almost almost two years ago and When I got the site at the rate the redesigned it being already is already ongoing So we inherited we had a triple seven read this website with a totally different design that if you go to the site It looks different than you see now and in December of two years ago We decided after going through some whole process and so Charles can we'll laugh about this But when I got hired and we were selling them on me and I'm like, yeah, I've done a ton of redesigns redesigns in my thing I love redesigns, which is totally true. It also Seriously have issues, but But at any rate, I'm like well six months will knock this out. It'll be great We'll totally launch it four months into that six months. I'm like, yeah, that's exactly what happened. He's like, um Maybe we should think about something different. So So after doing some research and internally and talking to folks and sort of Sitting down and saying we should reboot everything one of the things we decided was to upgrade a duper late And the main reason for us doing that among other things was that for our political culture and will and just internally It made sense for us. It was going to be smart for us to say Should we upgrade this now or later for us doing it then when the old site was still up and working and Is that thing too is for our internal users because they had used that old site for so long There wasn't really the they knew the no site was coming. We had talked to them about it They had heard about it But there wasn't this clamoring for like when's a new thing coming so that gave us a little bit of insulation for It was a little bit of a the boy who cries wolf. Yeah. Oh, yes. The the new site is coming Right new site is coming. Yes. Yes Constantly lots of that every six months and then like they told and people say to me and I'm still new They're like, yeah, y'all said that six months ago and I'm like, well, I wasn't here then but they didn't care about that So we decided to upgrade a duper late Around Christmas time. So clearly we had a really good Christmas, but But it was actually a really good decision And in that process we learned a lot of things like read the manual Yeah, I'm embarrassed by how long it took me to actually read the Drupal manual and the documentation is great Yeah, you should read it. It's it helps you a lot Exactly the other thing we did was we had gone through several iterations of our information architecture And a lot of that was focused on departmental content and going to departments is saying, what do you what's the most important thing? What's the answer all of it? Yes, only five folks looked at that page in the last year, but it's still really important to somebody And so that made us think about okay, so how do folks actually browse our site? How do we actually organize content? How do we deal with those shared pages because it turns out there's a lot of shared content in our case? Situations where like the city council has pages, but the clerk's office manages those pages They were in different apartments on our old site So whenever you wanted to shift the page you had to go in and change the department give them temporary permission and then change it back Totally not a problem And and ultimately checked our misconceptions about how folks browse their site You know we had some ideas about how we thought people looked at our site how they view things we talked So we did some small user testing We didn't have a lot of time or money to really do extensive user testing But we were able to work with some students at the university to do a little bit of it and helped us to So recalibrate how we decided to go forward But really the biggest thing with eight with us was giving us the chance to really dive in a Drupal in a more earnest way And to figure out how it could help us do what we wanted to do faster So the other thing too is some of the challenges we had so obviously I don't know where all of you work And I'd love to hear more about that But one of the things that working at a political organization is you run into especially at a local government level is you deal with all Even if you're not directly okay The mayor's office doesn't come down and find out what we're doing on a regular basis I mean it in general but not the website But one of the challenges of being in an organization is the mayor's change so this happened of course Charles is there longer than me So they showed up and the new mayor came in so That's not good or bad as much as it changes how you focus on your priorities So that person comes in and says I want to focus on this this and this that website project might get pushed behind because You know to them that's not necessarily the first thing they want to focus on and so as an IT team You're trying to figure out constantly with developers trying to figure out how you allocate those resources and everything else Obviously a small team of four Really three and a half right focusing on not just supporting the website But also something like 30 different applications internally a lot of those in-house that were built in house They were managing for all these different tools like the animal shelter and in parks and recreation all these other Systems that are being supported in house The web team is also part of the larger IT team and supporting some of their applications as well So there's a lot of priority shifting that happens So really you get me coming in and this is sort of my only job was working on the website and dealing with customers But then our other developers are having other things to do and that was challenging and also limited resources You can't just go buy something when you want it I mean we were I think having been a lot of places. I tell Charles I Appreciated how we were able to do what we were able to do But you also just didn't have a limitless budget to just you know hire a new person or do whatever and so that allowed that Sort of the constraints there were which would were difficult and we worked through them But those were the barriers that we had to work with and so yeah, so Again going back to what Ron hinted at where We we started by engaging with our departments and saying well what what content do you want to migrate to the new site and when as as Ron said everybody said everything yes, we want it all and so we I had initially spent some time creating these spreadsheets of all the content kind of keeping it grouped by that departmental structure and Quickly found that that that just didn't work for us We One week we couldn't really identify what those core content pieces were and to we started to realize that Organizing our content around the organization's departmental structure the organization's org chart is Not how our end users were really engaging with that content They they wanted to find a service to help them in their life They didn't want to know how the city was organized. They didn't want to know what department was responsible for that content so We we stayed we stayed engaged with our our content creators in in the departments But ultimately what we Decided was the most effective was to use data and Google analytics is a wonderful thing. So we we We started running out of time and we just needed to migrate the content and what better content to migrate than the stuff that everybody's looking for the stuff that everybody is actually using and That gave us a very clear easy to follow list of what content to migrate you start at the top you work your way down and You very quickly find the other pages that need to come to complete that content, but It gives us it gave us a really Clear easy to follow path for that content migration So yeah, and as as we did this we We got a chance to see all of the pages that had Kind of gotten lost in the old system. So We would often find duplicates for the same type of content that multiple people had created but didn't really know that somebody else had created a page for that already or Or or going back to that departmental structure for permissions Maybe somebody in one department created a page that was very similar to a page in another department But because of that artificial barrier They weren't able to really collaborate on that content so what we found in in our audit was that a Lot of those pages were just abandoned or not kept up to date and and that really led us to these these two ideas of Anybody can edit content on our new site. We love the revision history in Drupal that is key. So That way not only do we know who made a change, but we can facilitate people working together on that content and and and there is some Security there or peace of mind knowing that if anybody makes a mistake in editing the content There's a way to get back At least in our organization We've found that the real challenge is getting people to make those updates and keep content up to date So any anything that we can do to remove those barriers is actually a good thing And and then the second thing that we did was We do not allow anybody to create a new page that that is something that we control in ITS and That has already Saved us I think a lot of extra content We we get requests initially we had set up a Google form But now we just ask people to send an email to the webmaster Asking for these new pages and what we find is that I would say Nine times out of ten almost I mean it's quite frequent that Just searching our our sites content I find the page that they're looking for and it already exists and they just needed to know where it was and and and Know that they have the ability to make changes on that page and feel empowered to do that so Yeah, I'll turn it back over to Ron here So the decision to migrate the top 500 pages wasn't just a brilliant master stroke I mean it was but that's not why we decided to do it was mostly a time thing So like I said about political will we went from kind of like it's gonna be a site other sites coming other sites coming To hey the site needs to be launched in April It was January and we decided to migrate to Drupal 8 and we didn't know it super well Okay, great and then in April, they're like, okay, you have two weeks and then in May they're okay We have three weeks and then the end of May they said next week In the beginning June it said June 10th, and they're the press conference It did launch in June. It finally launched in June But the point is because of that constant change it forced us to be a make sure that when we did launch It wasn't a site of just like nothing but also figuring out again when people go to the site What's the most of one of the most important things the other thing that we did and I don't know I think it's a slide for it later But I do want to mention it since it's here. It's a separate system. That's for our board and commission agendas that are not housed within our CMS that just has and the beauty of that was that it allows Some folks who are not even city employees at all to be able to upload content and update update content And there's a whole process there But the beauty of that was it didn't enable us to be tied to that content inside of the website as well And and real quick. I realized that we didn't have a slide for this, but that that's another thing that I would caution really any organization is Don't get bogged down in the integrations with other systems So that's something that I would actually say That's one of the big reasons why we didn't get our Drupal 7 instance up and running is that we spent a lot of time Working on these custom in integrations custom Drupal modules with our other systems And it's very easy to lose sight of the core content the core content that you need to migrate and and get lost in how do I how do I integrate this this third-party system or this external system and Those things are good to do those integrations are good to do and we've we've been able to tackle them since but if you're just starting an initial site migration or content migration a New site really focusing on that that new content So how we got from the old site to the new site And one of the things just briefly really really briefly about some of the design changes We made the most specific thing we were trying to do and Drupal was great about letting us do this was that We didn't we felt like on the old site. There wasn't a very good sense of place and In some of our previous iterations of the website We didn't really do a great job of like promoting photos and like trying and not having a ton of photos We didn't want photos everywhere partially because of just the way end users tend to like want to put things in random places They don't belong and so we just we sort of after a lot of iteration and some design changes We decided to and if you go to the site now you can see it on different pages It's sort of having a big giant picture that users can edit those and each page is different every page has one And it turned it up being a really good compromise Internally for us, but you know it and so I guess what you're hearing constantly is is we tried to balance User needs Internally stakeholders internally with what the public was telling us they wanted because what we also did mention is throughout This entire process from the from the pre alpha days to the minute We launched and even after we had a forum on our website was at the top that let folks give feedback Anybody and folks gave us feedback. Oh boy. Did they but it was really helpful Most of the time to get that feedback because even the feedback that wasn't super helpful was helpful because it allowed us If you see enough people saying the same things over and over again You realize even if you don't want to hear it You're like, okay, we need to think about that or we need to address that or maybe we're not looking at things the right way And so but balancing all those those considerations was was part of what we were trying to do the entire time And so like I mentioned earlier good. Well, and just jumping in real quick. That was what ultimately led to I would say our our final site architecture. So We we experimented with a lot of different information architectures and What what we ultimately got was Based on feedback there were I would say four different groups of people that Wanted to use the site. So there were there were people who just wanted to publish the latest news The the latest events that were happening in the city and and that that became one of our core main Sub subcategories there were there were people that just wanted to talk about the operations of the organization. So kind of getting back to that departmental structure That That was the operations the boards and commissions the the inner workings of our city and then finally The the other two are kind of information and guides and then highlighting our top services. So trying to be very Public focused on what what do our constituents need? What are they looking for? How how are they interacting with our city? So That that turned out to be a very Stable way to structure our content and and meet a lot of those needs Because what you find in local government and probably in other organizations as well Is that people aren't finding what they're looking for especially in a situation where it's like? Okay, like if the business will just go somewhere else for the city There's no what there's nowhere else to go. So they can't find it They're gonna show up or they're gonna call you and they're gonna do that constantly And so you find out when folks are calling constantly because they can't find something and we get you know Second-tier feedback on this stuff. You realize okay was a problem Well, the calls are different now than they were say a year ago. And so that's a win The only thing I'll add the slide. I've talked about it already is that even though we didn't really necessarily leverage the plug-in Repository is super well away, but we don't have a ton of plug-ins. I mean, I've been God I don't know what you've done since I left but but we wait. I'm just you know, I mean plug-ins, but But what was nice about it was that it enabled us even we only installed a few paragraphs Some others but what was helpful for us was just having the ability to cut down on the in-house development time To do things that we would want to do a heck of a lot faster Especially given our shifting timelines then would have been the case had we been doing something different And having one place to go to get those those those plug-ins opposed to you know Some sort of free-for-all of plug-in mania that other CMS's may come with and so sort of overall lessons learned I mean there were a ton of them, but I think that Really assessing what the most important things are figuring out who your audience is whether this is again Whether you're the city whether you're working for you know a business or whatever else Understanding who your stakeholders are and not just external stakeholders, but also internal folks as well because of your subject matter experts aren't updating content If they're not Engaged and one of the things we kept preaching this happened before I got there and happened while I was there. It's still happening now I'm sure is Communicating the stakeholders that if you don't own this content people aren't gonna get the information Like this actually is your job and and over and over and part of how we were able to do that was and this was a team effort It wasn't just one person was hammering home the points constantly to people in-house through we'd have in-person sessions We sent out emails constantly so we're the boy cry wolf We saw a lot of emails updating folks on what was happening even if they didn't seem to care And they did once we told them more and more and they saw progress happening that was encouraging to them By having we used to we made screenshots we did we made I made screencasts for people So there were no it was really nobody could say oh I don't know how to do this because there were eight different ways to do it And then we'd sit with them upstairs in our IT room at least once a month when we launched It was once a week and say all right. What are your problems literally anything you need? How can we help you and then if they had a specific problems one person who's always wants a problem or something like that we Schedule time with them to sit down and help them figure out their problems So it's very hands-on and very labor-intensive in a way But it needed to be that way for us to be able to get the buy-in necessary The other thing too is the buy-in from above We had a lot of top cover that enabled us to do things like cut 90% of the content on the site and keep our jobs I recognize that for most people that's not a thing you can do or may not be tenable to do it But still thinking about what are the most important things? Like Charles said don't tackle everything at once you can't tackle Integrations and also migrate and also upgrade and also redevelop and also like Prioritize what's important figure out what your main goals are Sell that case to whoever you have to sell it to in order to make those things be the things you want to focus on and Then go in steps and if you can do that it's going to make your life easier Also recognizing constraints. I mean whether institutional constraints and internal just constraints departmental constraints And vocalize those things often I feel like in situations We like to be the heroes so we don't want to talk about what the problems are or what our constraints are But if someone doesn't understand what those constraints are they can't even in turn even in your stakeholders We tell them look they're four of us here's what we're working on So they understood what we were up against and trying to serve them so that they're you know When you didn't respond to their email the next day or something and we were really good about that But in cases where we didn't do those things folks understand that oh you've got a big job. Yeah, we do And the last thing is just it's just sparing the details I feel like in tech a lot We like to over explain things to users and people don't necessarily care about the minutiae and the details because we're really excited about it And sometimes like I don't know that we used to were Drupal a whole lot in our conversations I mean we told them we were changing to a new platform We discussed that it was Drupal, but we didn't get into the architecture of it We didn't explain about how great it was we tell them what was useful about it But we kept it to a minimum because at the end of the day They don't really care about that they don't know how it works for them What it's gonna do for them and when they saw how it worked they're like oh my gosh This is so much easier remember we I remember the first time we did a session like an actual user session on a screen like this in a Room somewhere everyone's very skeptical because we talked about this a lot And then we showed them how easy it was gonna be to update pages and they're like and so someone said oh my goodness This is gonna save me so much time and we're just like ha we did it We're here so sometimes just show rather than tell Yeah So I think this this goes back to what what Ron was getting at where We engaged with our internal users a lot as far as what questions they had and what challenges they were facing and One thing that helped us was developing Internal documentation in internal training materials early getting those started right out of the gate Because then as we had these These questions come up. We could just fill in where where the gaps were and and that resource has has really helped us with onboarding new employees at the city We we still get questions of well I would like my new employee to have access to edit content on the website It's like well, they already have it, you know, they they can do it right now and I I have an easy way to share some initial documentation with them and They can run through that at their at their own pace and and then we're still there for any other questions and Can fill in that documentation as we go so That that has been great and I encourage any organization to be sure that you're actively updating that that material Yeah, I think we've covered one other thing I thought about too is guidelines So there weren't a whole lot of we didn't have a ton of codified guidelines about like everything in terms of What's on loud on the site? What's not allowed on the site? What permit, you know, what you can do what you can't do At least with it was sort of it sort of like articulated, but it wasn't documented and Because we sort of decided throughout this process that it would be really important to document those things so that when someone asks or something You can just point back to the guidelines and say, you know, actually, it's not in the web guidelines or you know Trying to work on tone and voice as well Trying to figure out some of the other content things, but it's if you can document anything It's going to make your job easier later Irrespective of how you're using the CMS or what you're doing with it Because you can be consistent about how you apply Whatever is you're trying to do and everything else have kind of covered Like I said, it's really really help. It's been really really helpful to be part of a wider community Because it enables us to share stories and and and have conversations about like what works best practices Rather than especially coming from an in-house especially coming from an in-house system where it's just like it's us. Good luck Having a system that that other people are using and deploying in lots of different ways Well, and and and the other thing that really helped us was looking at other cities who had who had used Drupal Boston had just recently done a migration the year before we saw them at Code for America and It was just great to have An example to look at see what they had done see what had worked for them see what things Like they were able to rewrite every piece of content before it went on the site We would have loved to have done that, but it wasn't realistic for us to tackle that but just hearing those stories and and and the other great thing about being in a municipal government and being able to make all of that open source is that Anybody can use that work. It's it's available Please use it, you know, like and that's a great place to be where we can share that Both design content strategies anything so post launch site traffic stop For the first time folks are no longer having to click that want to see full site Because mobile traffic is the majority of the traffic when I I don't mean it was somewhere for 50 or 50 percent months ago Which is great Internal search. This is actually the things we didn't expect where things like internal search dropped like 70% And what I mean is people were using internal search a ton on the old site You try to find what they were looking for and not finding it on the new site They barely searched but they get where they want to go and it's and you can tell because they're just like literally It's just one click two clicks They get where they're going because before they were like four or five levels deep because that's how the site was set up We didn't really want the new site to go more than three layers deep It does sometimes we try to minimize that I Think the exit rate dropped quite a bit Bouncer rates dropped dramatically I mean like some absurd number that doesn't even sound like a real number and the site gets a decent amount of traffic So it's not even like it's site with 20 people on it You're like, oh well, does that really mean anything the numbers that we're changing were big Of course to be fair you could take the entire city website down only put the animal shelter up And we probably same amount of traffic to be fair But like it's by far it eclipses anything else on the site by far as like there's the animal shelter and everything else Even the home page even and that was another lesson that we learned a lot of people in our in our city They want their content on the home page, but it it doesn't really matter That's that's not what's driving people to their specific content. It needs to be well written Google is is going to drive People to that content and I think our animal shelter is is proof of that it gets more traffic than our home page itself So it's not off the front page. So you can't go straight to the animal shelter. You've got to get it Yeah, it should be on the front. It should be should be just dogs on the front page And I think I was just cats in a rabbit. We were a big rabbit town. I don't really get it. So Some resources that you can check out Yeah, we like I said, we do have a all of our Drupal modules are on our GitHub page We're happy to talk about what we've done and share share anything that we've done We have we have a number of those other third-party or separate systems from Drupal that we've created we have a custom boards and committee membership tracking system that We use to track our meeting minutes and agendas And and packets and we've integrated that with our Drupal instance We've had success integrating Google Calendar with Drupal so that Our calendar and events listings are driven by the Google calendars that City staff are actually using to track their meeting meeting events Like Ron mentioned we have we use an open source software for our animal shelter animal shelter manager and we We wrote a Drupal module to pull the animals that are up for adoption and be able to show those in real-time on our Drupal site so a Lot of good resources there and we'd be happy to Collaborate with anybody on that So yeah, that's it Ask lots of questions or anyway. Thanks for your time. Thank you all Yes So the question is do we have any workflow or review? now that we have a new workflow for reviewing content before it goes live and The answer is no We we have People who work for the city and we have the public and if anything goes up that shouldn't go up We have that revision history and we can go back and have that conversation but Like I said, we've had more of a challenge getting people to make those edits than we have so far Knock on wood. We haven't had anything go up that shouldn't have been up. So That hasn't proved to be an actual Issue that was true on the old site too. You could just edit as long as in your department You could edit the content the same way so That might help this status quo is kind of it's kind of the same now use edit anything, but people don't want to do extra work Yeah, the the question just for the recording is By opening up access. Did we notice the number of people who were making edits go up or down? Yeah, I would I would definitely say that the number has gone up That was even pre-launch so like pre-launch We train some folks who are more active went to departments and said hey You can get a jump on this put some content in the site And they took us up on it and started adding content months before we launched the site Which was really helpful for us, of course because you know, we were at capacity But yeah by far compared to the old site on the old site There may have been a dozen people at any given time during the year who were regular regular users of the site That number is surely tripled by now I The other the other thing I would add to that is I think migrating to a system like Drupal that is more user-friendly than our previous system What we saw on our old site was that most departments would delegate updating content to their interns and so the interns would be kind of the primary voice of our city and And then they would leave like an intern is not going to stick around very long so Kind of lowering that barrier to entry having something that's a little bit more user-friendly We're seeing better engagement and more more people are making those edits. Thank you So how did we Create an open engaging environment to supporting our customers without mansplaining About their about the content or the process I think that honestly, I think it starts from the top in that department It's just in general That's just the way the structure department is it's very customer focused and customer customer centric and and so I Think that that probably helped a lot. So the report was already there So this wasn't an onboarding process. Hey, we're new we're talking to you as more user ongoing customers It's not a very big city. So, you know, we're not dealing with tens of people rather than thousands or hundreds of people which probably helped some to Yeah, I would add that just being focused on customer service and in our case it our customers our internal employees other staff in the city and and trying to Help them help us and and be on the same team and listen to what their what their questions are Yeah, like not being condescending or rude or I mean, I Think I think being a local government probably lends itself to a different than or the organizations where you'd have more of an education process Or of trying to educate people on these kinds of things But I think that it's it's a it's a it's an ongoing process, right of creating a culture and a climate that is supportive of Of everyone and these people where they're at. I think that's it, right? Like I'm not assuming people should know something folks come to us often You know everyone working in tech has heard someone say oh, I don't know this really well or I'm dumb and it's like no you're not You're competent. You know what you're doing. Let's just figure this out or let's make the six more accessible and and Ron also hinted like we didn't go into a lot of Drupal specific jargon we we we tried to keep it very high level and just non No one knows what a note is in our organization and and then still the site still works like it's great You had a question in the back Well, yeah, yes so the question so the question was is is talk more about our some of the user experience research that went into the process and whatever else and so well again, we didn't we We did several things obviously using analytics was very helpful for us in terms of just being able to figure out like to sort of Map a flow of where people are going We did some in-person stuff as well talking We had some students work working with some students at the university to talk to some end users Just stakeholders that we had no idea who they were to find out how they use the site And that that was more at the design stage. Yeah, we had mock-ups and We we engaged with our local university had had a great intern helping us with some of those design elements and then Taking those out to to people and then the other thing was the the the Google forum survey that we had up on our our alpha site so we we were able to put put the website up before it was ready and Solicit public feedback And we would do press releases Encouraging the public to come to that alpha site take a look use use just a simple Google form to give us that feedback of Anything that they thought That's probably the biggest thing in terms of actual user research that we did was getting that feedback and in that that form was up The entire time so every iteration of the alpha you saw that Form on the site so people folks who were developers often we were right back and be like this is the worst that I've ever seen in my life I built better sites. This is my sleep We never did want to write back and say you can come help us, but we never did that but we wanted to So Yeah, so that that was probably the biggest thing that we did a lot of other anecdotal smaller things that we would do just to get some Snapshots, but might be more on the design research side Then we did on the other than the survey on the UX side of it just because of a capacity Sure So is part of that wanting to expand Drupal the use of Drupal outside of your specific department or Okay, sure. So That was that was an area that we had concern using Drupal for because we didn't want it to Bog down the system with a lot of manually updated Information and and board and committee members are changing all of the time Our city staff liaison for those boards and commissions are changing as as employees come and go And we were more comfortable developing a separate system. We call it on board and That's that's a PHP application that we wrote that's that's open source and available on our github And we do have a Drupal module that integrates with that system so We decided to opt for a kind of a separate system that would handle managing those documents And in tying those together with the corresponding Meeting dates So that that was ultimately what what we decided to do was kind of keep that that separate system Thank you I Okay Well So as far as Are you talking information architecture or are like more of a lower-level system? We didn't use anything like that Again our our content is rather open as far as who can edit it but I One thing that we didn't touch on that that was very useful is that our use of aliases URL aliases, so trying to topically group content under under a Sub-directory effectively. I mean it's not really a sub-directory, but Grouping that similar content under under those URLs and making sure that everything has a good Named route for that alias I'm not sure if that's exactly Well, so we didn't yeah, we didn't separate the content Actually, so some of the some of the applications like the animal shelters a separate application entirely and the content gets pulled into Drupal And Charles can speak to that And so other we have other things like that Board of Commission is the same thing It's a separate application the application the content gets pulled into our Drupal instance But the actual content for Drupal is just like actual city hall content And it's so it's just the content people can edit but those aren't separate by cons separate by departments So we didn't separate it by departments folks only folks access their content. They can access anything Which is unusual But in our in our case it made sense because we have so many things that are shared that if we didn't do that what happened is you have Redundant content for different departments on the site because folks be like well I have to have my version of this page on the site So we chose not to do that on the separate by to silo it out so folks can't edit things Thank you anything else Yes So the question is how was working on a site for a city the size of Bloomington different than working for either a bigger city like Boston or even a smaller city and I think the answer to that is that most cities have Similar services that they have to offer regardless of what size they are I think the only difference comes in the amount of resources that they have the amount of people that they have Dedicated to doing a specific task so the smaller the city I think generally the fewer People that you have working on that specific task or the more hats that people have to wear So the the more that you can leverage something that's Kind of already been done and solved. I think the better the better you are Also just interference So somebody who went from like Really small places to state government to local and now doing federal work What's interesting is that the amendment amount of people who are inner running in the interference in terms of what you're trying to do And so Bloomington was sort of like almost just the right size I mean there's obviously some interference because you just have levels of whatever But it's not so much that like you can get to anybody you need to talk to is right You can go talk to them You don't need to get make an appointment to go talk to somebody for the most part You can just go hey have a five-minute conversation and solve problems in a smaller place I think you'd have more of that in a bigger place you'd have a lot less of that just because of the constraints involved But I think that it's the right size in terms of Resources and access but not you know not so little that you can't get anything done Or you're just like we can't do anything but not so big that It gets to be unwieldy or you have a lot of a lot of sort of hands in the pot Yes, and then yes One and then two yeah So the when we also the question was is 90% of the content we dropped we're still maintaining it in house How do you do that the old site is still accessible internally only and we did that because obviously we didn't folks folks If they're could have migrated later and I mean it's been almost a year now at the time We're like well if you want to migrate it later And you will in most cases you want to be able to access that content and then be able to pull it over to The new site or clean it up and so we allowed people to do that and so they still can access it from internally Yeah, and that that goes along with During the actual site migration one one of the issues that we were having and it could be because we had cried wolf so many times and and And said that oh yes the site is launching But one of the issues that we were having was getting people to actually do help us with that content migration and This was a way that we could launch with kind of that core content, but still Maintain the old system internally So that if there was something that we missed that that truly needed to be on the new site Employees would still have access to it But we wanted to make sure that that's internal only because we don't want to confuse the public or still have those old links out there and Have people stumbling across that old content also We created redirects for every one of the old pages. It's redirects for every one of the old pages on the on the Google So you didn't you know so so yeah, that was that was a that was a yeoman's effort for sure We had one question last every month. Yes. Yes So the question is is you know, okay working at a university and trying to build buy-in How do you get buy-in to be able to cut content from the site? So having been in the university bucket? I can tell you that Well for us just answer the question and then I'll speak more specifically I think that for us it was several things one it was ended being time-based. I feel like I mean you speak to it the I would say that the biggest thing that Got us buy-in was the frustration that everybody had in using the old site Both internally and and feedback that we would get from the public Saying that they just had a hard time using the site and the main reason that they had a hard time using the site Was because there was too much content too much stale content out outdated content. So of course, it's going to be difficult to To find what you're looking for if if the content is a mess and the only way you can really Solve that is by doing some serious house housekeeping So that gave us buy-in like our our mayor and Directors knew knew that this was an issue They had they had received these complaints from the public before so They they knew it was a problem and the numbers I guess yeah You reminded me the last the other thing is the numbers using the analytics was a very powerful way Even to departments to say look eight people have been to this page in two years. I know because I ran the numbers And then they'd look at you and go oh Okay, I guess I can tie that with some other page Yeah, maybe we can and so I think that that's a really powerful way to just show people that It's not always that it's not important and it's not being dismissive, right? It's just like how can we consolidate this or how can we make this in a way that people are gonna find it? Do we need to move it up? Do we need to change it? There are some situations occasionally where folks had content that maybe only had 25 views over a year But for whatever reason it was either in the wrong place or it was really important content But you know, we didn't know why we had forms on it or something like that So we needed to reach it up. So those are situations exist, but 80% of the time They're just pages that people forgot about or needed to be ignored So I think having the data at your at your disposal is really helpful and also talking about Figuring out what people are looking for is a really good way to do that I think we're at time. So if you make questions, we'll be around feel free to ping us. We appreciate you very much Thanks for coming. Yeah, thank you