It is incredibly important that citizens find information quickly and intuitively. The service must therefore be tailored to the citizen. Because of this, a preliminary study with different core tasks is extremely important to see together with the municipality of Beveren on which information architecture the web platform should be built.
Web platform Beveren
The municipality of Beveren chose to develop their new portal website, where service is paramount, in Drupal technology. The website beveren.be must inform every visitor in a user-friendly and transparent way about all services and news, and this based on a well thought out information architecture and search functionality.
The citizen is central
Dynamic page construction
With Drupal Paragraphs, a webmaster or editor can easily build dynamic pages. By the way, the webmaster of the municipality of Beveren does not need any programming knowledge to create those dynamic pages. That's how handy Drupal's layout builder is.
User-friendly search function
We provide the website with a dynamic Drupal Search API search function. We also build in an autocomplete functionality so that citizens can quickly find the information they want.
In consultation with the municipality of Beveren, we determine what kind of content search engines should index. Based on fields (e.g. title and meta tags), certain words are given an extra "score," which places these pages higher in search results.
For the schools of the municipality of Beveren, we build a separate landing page. At a glance, you can see all the schools of the municipality on a dynamic map.
Opening hours and closing calendars
The various services of the municipality - think City Hall, tourism, permanences of the boroughs - do not always have the same opening hours and closing days. Therefore, the municipality's webmaster can either set separate opening hours for each location, or use the functionality where one particular closing calendar is applied across multiple locations. Are there any last-minute changes? With this same functionality, the webmaster adjusts the relevant locations in one fell swoop. Whichever way is chosen, we make sure that all information is easy to find by the citizen.
New website for CC Ter Vesten
As the engine of a creative and cultural society, Ter Vesten is the center for culture and art in Beveren. Its offerings, with a focus on innovation and quality, form the basis of an operation with regional appeal. With a view to the past, the present and the future, CC Ter Vesten welcomes a wide audience with an inspiring range of different disciplines.
The Ter Vesten cultural center aims to be a catalyst and engine for creative encounters. The visitors are a reflection of society in the Beveren region. The program carries the quality label and is a reference in the region for the professional arts.
Construction and renovation of CC Ter Vesten
We converted the Beveren.be website to a Drupal Multisite platform. Updates, such as security updates, are not performed per site on such a platform, but on the entire multisite platform. This is a big advantage in terms of support and management: it saves money and time.
By the way, each subsite has its own identity and configuration, while certain functionalities are shared. Each subsite has its own database of content and users, but in the future it can always be chosen to create data flows between subsites.
Reusability of functionalities, modules and components is paramount. When building CC Ter Vesten, we made maximum use of the previously developed components of Beveren.be. For example, we recycled the Paragraphs system (to develop dynamic pages by a webmaster) for the development of CC Ter Vesten.
External link with Ticketmatic
At the time of writing, we are building an integration with the external supplier Ticketmatic. This will make it possible, for example, to check in real-time whether an event is sold out or not.
Preventing waste during the preliminary process
A simple, user-friendly website with an easy-to-access program guide is crucial. This involves the use of convenient filters where users can intuitively find their preferred events.
The initial task was an upgrade from the current Drupal 7 to a renewed variant in Drupal 9. Since we had already developed beveren.be, we proposed to hook the new tervesten.be into this. Centralizing the management of both websites and reusing elements between both environments was music to the ears of Beveren's website managers!
We analyzed the possibilities to evolve to a codebase with two websites: beveren.be and tervesten.be. An extensive preliminary process focusing on recycling elements from beveren.be followed.
User-friendliness and simplicity were key here: a redesign and an analysis towards automation of ticketing were logical next steps!
Result? A new web platform with a fresh look!
A website of Beveren.be and CC Ter Vesten has many target groups. So an easy-to-use website with a well thought-out user experience is definitely the way to go.
The rebuild of the CC Ter Vesten website from Drupal 7 to 9 was an excellent moment to renew the whole. Besides a new, fresh design, we also created a logical navigation structure and an easy user flow to order tickets.
As a bonus, we analyzed and developed the possibility to fully automate the underlying link with the ticketing platform.
A content migration was ultimately not necessary here, because the website was ready for the start of the new cultural season and could therefore immediately be filled with content. Talk about a fresh, new start!