City of Willich: Simultaneous relaunch of the Willich portals City Administration, Neersen Festival & De Bütt

The town of Willich had previously used a proprietary HCL Notes-based CMS solution from the Lower Rhine Municipal Data Center. Due to the discontinuation of the system in favor of a powerful open source solution, the relaunch of the municipal website of the town of Willich was planned as a migration project by the Internet service team at the Lower Rhine Municipal Data Center.

As part of a proof of concept in 2018, the Drupal distribution “Drupolis” was developed by the Lower Rhine Municipal Data Center and made available throughout the entire association. The relaunch of the city of Willich was also implemented on this platform. With a period of nine years between the relaunch of the old website and the relaunch of the current one, the content had accumulated considerably. A total of over 6,000 pages and 8,000 files had to be evaluated, updated, and migrated. After data analysis, approximately 3,000 pages and 3,500 files remained as the new target size. The focus of the relaunch is entirely on public communication with citizens and citizen services and the associated expansion of Online Access Act (OZG) support.

Accessibility has been a major concern for the association and the town of Willich since 2006. For this reason, the new design was developed and implemented in collaboration with the agency anatom5 GmbH.

In addition to the main website for the town of Willich, the subsidiary websites for the Neersen Festival and De Bütt leisure pool were also created and launched on the same basis. This project therefore consisted of three simultaneous migration projects. The Neersen Festival offers a variety of events that attract visitors from across the region and take place on an open-air stage in front of the historic backdrop of Neersen Castle. Freizeitbad De Bütt is a popular leisure pool in the region with a playful design and is very popular with families and children in the region.

Project Goals and Results

The aim of the relaunch was to modernize the digital portfolio of the town of Willich and its subsidiary sites Festspiele Neersen and Freizeitbad De Bütt. One of the main reasons was to replace the discontinued proprietary HCL Notes-based CMS solution with Drupal. The accessibility requirements that have been tightened in recent years, not least by the EU's EN 301 549 standard, meant that updating general accessibility was also a major concern in this project.

In order to meet the content requirements for long-running projects, easy-to-use building blocks were developed based on Paragraphs, providing editors with an easy-to-use tool for creating individual pages. For further optional layout options, a module was added with layout paragraphs, which offers editors a very good WYSIWYG experience and provides good support for everything from simple 50%-50% splits to more complex card elements.

All municipalities in North Rhine-Westphalia must exchange their services with the state of North Rhine-Westphalia in order to provide optimal monitoring of OZG support. For this purpose, a module has been implemented in our distribution that enables the structured recording of OZG service bundles, including the classification of individual LeiKa numbers. On this basis, a valid XZuFi reference is automatically generated, which the state of North Rhine-Westphalia can retrieve in order to import all service bundles.

Despite the extensive content (currently approx. 3000 nodes and 3500 files), fast loading times have always been an important part of optimizing the user experience. By using responsive image styles, LazySizes, and image conversions to WebP, all illustrations can be transferred quickly and without blocking. The success is impressive, with a Lighthouse rating of over 95% in all areas (performance, accessibility, best practices, SEO). Thanks to the simultaneous implementation of all three portals with a common theme and configuration basis, this applies to all portals at the same time.

Challenges

The biggest challenge in this project was clearly data migration. The current websites had been running since 2014. With content that had been revised several times over the years, the content structures became increasingly unclear. However, as our team already had some experience with migration projects from our proprietary CMS solution to Drupal, we were able to successfully migrate most of the content using the Drupal Migration Framework, thanks to prior data analysis. During the migration process, old content was discarded and content requiring revision was extracted and forwarded to the customer for explicit revision. The rest could be transferred to the new data model in Drupal by improving the data structures. It was an exciting challenge to relaunch three independent websites on one platform.

Conclusion

Public institutions are often the subject of negative media coverage when it comes to modern digitalization. With this project, we have succeeded in enabling a decentralized editorial team of over 60 editors with a stable role concept to design individual websites easily and organically without extensive guidance and to publish them online in a timely manner.

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