Aha Consulting understands the unique needs of municipalities and the information architectures necessary to support them. Best in class eGovernment websites organize and present information in a way that caters to many different audiences, providing the site visitor a unique and tailored experience. Residents, visitors, business owners, and city employees typically represent the primary user profiles for a municipal site. Specialized content for seniors, children, home-based businesses, and commercial businesses are examples of how a municipality might further distinguish and set itself apart from the average website.

Aha's eGovernment Portal addresses these challenges by implementing an information architecture that accommodates for rich flexibility in the way content is stored and delivered to each unique website user. Specifically, we will enable role-based content authoring and approval based on department so an organization's staff can create and store web pages based on their logical departmental organizational structure; in parallel, we will expose and present content to end-users in a targeted way through the combination of intuitive, audience-specific navigational menus and dynamically-presented content that is driven by relevant content tags and taxonomies.

It is also common for governmental organizations to have a combination of casual users as well as those who use the website on a daily basis. Aha’s Drupal-based information architecture will accommodate for this. We will recommend a combination of navigational menus that allow the frequent user minimum clicks to reach their targeted information (goal of 1 click in most cases, 2 clicks otherwise), while at the same time providing casual users an intuitive navigational flow based on their user profile (e.g. visitor, resident, business-owner, or employee).

Aha's eGovernment Portal also defines a common framework and thematic experience across all departments- and will provide a flexible theme that provides variations in thematic branding and navigation - enabling each department some flexibility while still maintaining a common user experience across the website.

Finally, as part of that architecture we recommend placing ‘breadcrumb’ links on each page that allow a user to easily traverse from the page they are viewing all the way back to the home page. Drupal provides a powerful indexed searching out-of-the-box, so this will of course also be included as part of our information architectural design.