COMHAIRLE CONTAE ÁTHA CLIATH THEAS
SOUTH DUBLIN COUNTY COUNCIL

MEETING OF SOUTH DUBLIN COUNTY COUNCIL

Monday, March 12, 2012

QUESTION NO.  7

QUESTION: Councillor C. Jones

To ask the Manager to report on any progress to update South Dublin County Council website?

REPLY:

Further to previous reports with respect to a redesign of the Council’s web site, the Council has found it necessary on foot of data security concerns to replace in its entirety the open source content management system which the Council is operating.  The project has thus ballooned in terms of its magnitude, scope, and the originally envisaged timescales which would be involved.

The Council’s aim is to implement a Content Management solution that gives excellent business performance and efficiency advantages beyond just web content management but will also extend to eForms and Self Service functions to streamline business and information exchange, working in a variety of communications channels including websites, social media, intranet and extranet portals, mobile devices and GIS technologies.

Alternative Open Source CMS solutions have been considered and evaluated against our defined requirements.  Following extensive preliminary work and solution evaluation over the six months, South Dublin County Council has selected Drupal 7 as the Content Management System of choice.

The current indicative timelines are that by the end of Q2, 2012 South Dublin County Council should be in a position to have migrated all corporate websites to Drupal 7 with web content hosted securely in the Cloud.  Part of this process will be to conduct a full review and update of all information displayed on the sites as well as the removal of out of date material.

Some advantages of Drupal 7 over our existing setup are:-

• Multisite capabilities – single search across all sites, single codebase to maintain & administer all sites, install modules once & use globally.
• Accessibility – Drupal is standards-based by design. 
• Drupal Internationalisation Module allows multilingual websites.

On foot of approval for a replacement CMS, an agreed Web Strategy will allow SDCC stakeholders in this project to set targets and deliver results.  This, in turn, will provide us with the opportunity to define, evaluate, measure and deliver an effective Web Strategy, which will be underpinned by an effective and efficient Content Management System.

Information Architecture has shown that our current sites need improvements in content, functionality, on-line forms, structure, ease of finding information and intuitiveness.

Time-sensitive content will have expiry dates, ensuring information is up to date; automatic workflow processes will ensure that all web content is approved by the relevant administrators; and those who want pages changed or added won't need any technical knowledge (such as HTML or web editing software) to change the content themselves.

The new website will provide easy access to relevant information to the many different communities of users, councillors and staff.

They will: 

·          Be easy to use and navigate

·          Present information from a "user's perspective" and in a logical sequence

·          Be flexible and scalable

·          Be up to date

·          Be accessible to WAI-AA standards