Municipality of Maastricht
A municipal website is the most important information and service tool of a municipality. The better equipped, the more residents and businesses will manage their affairs digitally. This requires a good product, but also meticulous quality management. With these ambitions, the municipality of Maastricht found a partner in Betawerk for a long-term collaboration. With the Drupal CMS we realized a municipal website and multisite platform for the management of all websites of the municipality of Maastricht.
Accessible digital services
A major challenge facing municipalities is making their services available digitally. In an accessible and efficient way, so that everyone can arrange their own affairs. The old website contributed insufficiently to this. We therefore designed the municipal website from scratch and focused on the end user. It should be as easy as possible for everyone to arrange business, find relevant information and be involved in the international city of Maastricht. The new interface makes navigating the municipal site more intuitive, which improves the user experience. That interface has been designed mobile first; more than 65% of all users visit the site and arrange things via a mobile device.
User research
Extensive user research laid the foundation for our approach. We combined this with data analysis of years of website visits to the municipal website. Inclusion and digital accessibility were (and remain) important themes. The new municipal site has been designed in such a way that it is also easily accessible for people with disabilities. It meets all legal and social requirements regarding inclusion and accessibility and in that regard even exceeds the national benchmark. For example, with the integrated reading function, we also help visually impaired, low-literate and dyslexic people with the right information.
Grip on quality
Above all, a government wants to be reliable. That requires quite a bit from an organisation, such as the municipality of Maastricht, where more than a hundred different people are responsible for many pages and news items. In the old situation, this responsibility was insufficiently organized and relied on the involvement of ‘internal owners’. As a result, the organization had little control over the quality level of information and services.
We solved that with smart automated content management. With periodic incentives, we now help internal owners keep their business up-to-date. Managers gain insight into the topicality of their content with a dashboard and automatic reports. We also use a quality control tool to analyze content accessibility: language level, dead links, WCAG2.1 compliance and more. In addition to the technical solution, we also helped the municipality of Maastricht to implement this organisationally.
*WINNER! 🎉 The multisite of the municipality of Maastricht has won silver at the Drupal Splash Awards in the government category! The Splash Awards are awarded annually to the best Dutch internet projects realized with Drupal*
Case informatie
Municipality of Maastricht