Aha's Drupal Framework for Municipalities
Aha Consulting understands the unique needs of cities, counties, and other local government agencies and the information architectures necessary to support them. Best in class municipal 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 internal staff typically represent the primary user profiles for a municipal site. Specialized content and user navigation for seniors, children, home-based businesses, commercial businesses, and general visitors are examples of how a municipality might further distinguish and set itself apart from the average website.
Aha's Fast Track for Drupal web CMS solution 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 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 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 municipalities to have a combination of casual web users as well as those who use the website on a daily basis. Aha’s Drupal-based information architecture accommodates for this. We work with each client to develop navigational menus and categories 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 internal staff).
Aha's Fast Track for Drupal municipal web CMS solution also defines a common framework and thematic experience across all departments - providing a flexible theme and template structure that provides variations in departmental 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 place ‘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 capability out-of-the-box, so this will of course also be included as part of our information architectural design.
Our Aha Fast Track for Drupal municipal open-source offering that provides a compelling alternative for your city, town, county, library, or other government agency to consider.
