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Skyscrapers and a Ferris Wheel in the skyline of Atlanta

Georgia.Gov Multisite Leads the Way on Drupal

Georgia.gov becomes the first state portal in the country to be powered on Drupal with responsive web design. 

Visit georgia.gov

Project Highlights

With web traffic over 1.2 million views per month, the team at the Georgia Technology Authority (GTA) needed a platform that was enterprise-ready, cost-effective, flexible, and had proven sector adoption.

GTA partnered with Mediacurrent to redesign GeorgiaGov and 65 state websites plugged with analytics and intelligent search, all launched on Drupal. The transition from an “old school” design hosted on a proprietary Vignette CMS to a new, search-centric, responsive design on an open source platform was a great journey.

 

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    Georgia.gov became the first state portal in the country to be powered on Drupal with Responsive Web Design.

     

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    Moving to Drupal and a cloud-based hosting environment saves the state millions each year.

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    Stakeholders were satisfied with the overall migration process.

We are excited about the possibilities that Drupal brings to the state of Georgia. This new platform will give us the flexibility to offer more online services to Georgians while making government more efficient and saving taxpayers money.

Calvin Rhodes Chief Information Officer for the state of Georgia

User Experience

A Flexible, Yet Consistent Framework

Eight standardized themes were developed from which Each Georgia agency could choose. The themes gave agencies some flexibility in creating their own brand while giving users a more common user experience.

With mobile users accounting for 11% of their total traffic, the team used responsive web design with Drupal to create an excellent experience on any screen size. 

Georgia.gov responsive Drupal site on desktop, mobile, and tablet devices

Development

Challenges and Solutions

One of the largest technical hurdles was migrating content from Vignette onto Drupal with distributed content distributed across three versions. Mediacurrent worked closely with systems administrators at GTA to develop a specification of how to best export, format and retrieve the data for migration for each version of Vignette.

A custom OpenPublic-based install profile that extended the OpenPublic base installation allows GTA to spin up new sites in the future, ensuring that all sites run on the same platform with full access to a common feature set.

Final Thoughts

Mediacurrent is incredibly proud of our home state for being the first state adoption of Drupal as an enterprise CMS. The new Georgia.gov offers visitors a friendlier navigation, greater usability and more robust search functions. While on the backend Drupal offers solid site security and ease of use for non-technical administrators. 

In partnership with Phase2 Technology and Acquia, Mediacurrent hit a home run for the state of Georgia in their CMS migration project. Even more impressive is the homerun GTA hit for Georgia taxpayers- saving them $4.6 million by moving to Drupal.