Suffolk County Council

In 2022, the team migrated to Contensis, building a council website to be proud of that was delivered on time and under budget.

The problem

In 2021, the team at Suffolk County Council recognised that their current CMS was no longer fit for purpose.

Their previous systems, SilverStripe and EndeavourCMS, needed to be updated and could not scale up to meet demand.

The team at SCC needed a single CMS system that was reliable and secure and could work with them, not against them.

Lacking in-house resources for the project, the team looked for alternatives via G-cloud and chose Zengenti, relying upon the Zengenti professional services team to get the project up and running.

The product owner and lead content designer at Suffolk County Council, Andy Tipp, commented: “Contensis has a lot of features that our previous CMS was lacking, including workflow, in-page feedback, scheduled publishing and flexibility over webpage layout (i.e. being able to drag and drop components to reorder a page).”

Not only that, “the design and usability of the user interface (UI) was a key factor. Some of the other CMS options we considered looked quite dated and clunky. By contrast, Contensis has a clean, fresh and modern UI that feels nice to use.” says Andy.

The solution

Contensis had the edge over other CMS’ with its clean, fresh and modern UI. The Suffolk team loved it.

“Don’t underestimate the power of aesthetics. Staff in local authorities have to spend a lot of time using clunky, off-the-shelf back-office systems, and Contensis feels like a breath of fresh air compared to many of those; it’s light, bright and pleasant to engage with.” says product owner and lead content designer Andy Tipp.

But it wasn’t just the easy-to-use UI that won the hearts of the Suffolk team. It was the ability to have a unified brand experience in one CMS with reliability and scalability, a CMS that would work with them, not against them.

A unified brand experience

Moving to Contensis saw the team migrate from two CMS’ to a single CMS platform, which offered flexibility and improved accessibility.

“Our previous CMS was quite a clunky system to use, without much flexibility in how to design page content.” says Andy.

Contensis would be the content hub that would manage the main council website and microsites whilst providing flexible and seamless governance for content design and structure and serving user needs.

Andy continued, “From an admin perspective, we have a lot more control over the quality of what gets published to our websites now – ensuring a better experience for users.”

The previous CMS had a restrictive editorial experience that lacked content governance, which provided the opportunity for inconsistencies to arise across the Suffolk sites.

Working from content types and entries in Contensis, the team can customise the content with much more flexibility (subject to admin approval, of course!) compared with their previous WYSIWYG editor.

A CMS to rely upon

A key objective of the web project was to provide a secure web service to the people of Suffolk. By migrating to Contensis, the team replaced the out-of-date technology with a modern CMS that is secure, resilient to spikes in traffic (minimising downtime) and is scalable to meet demand.

Being on Contensis cloud has provided more security with regular software updates taking place every 8-10 weeks and has meant the team could also reduce their reliance on the IT team to maintain and support their CMS platform.

The CMS permissions and workflow features has also provided reliability for the team in terms of content accuracy.

“Workflow is probably the most important new functionality.” Says lead content designer, Andy Tipp.

“Previously, we needed to retrospectively review content to check it against our guidelines; there was no built-in mechanism within our CMS to approve (or reject) content from editors.

Now with Contensis, we’re able to ensure that content meets our best practice standards and legal compliance before it’s published live for people in Suffolk to use.” Andy commented.

Scalability

The Suffolk team identified that managing demand across their website could often be quite difficult. This was especially true with the live chat functionality, due to a difficult to navigate previous site structure.

Working with the Zengenti team, the Suffolk website had the information architecture updated to make it easier for the community to self-serve online, for example finding out when their bins were due to be collected, or how to pay their council tax online, and reduce demand on their live chat for more important enquiries.

The outcome? On-time and under budget

The outcome was a project delivered on time, under budget and had met all the core objectives. Score!

In 8.5 weeks of starting the project, the team delivered the Suffolk day microsite and put the foundations in for other sites by developing repeatable microsite template themes, followed by the main Suffolk council website.

Not their first agile rodeo

Whilst it wasn’t the team’s first rodeo working agile, product owner Andy remarked, “working with a fixed deadline, set budget and prioritised, flexible set of requirements was refreshing.

Most of my experience with internal or supplier-based projects has been more waterfall-based, where launch dates get pushed back further and further because of unrealistic expectations and a giant spec which needs to be delivered 100%.” Working in agile way meant the team was able to deliver value quickly and gather feedback from their key stakeholders as soon as possible.

Improved team efficiencies

Reflecting on the project Andy said “Our processes are much more efficient and productive using Contensis.

Our centralised web team can review and approve new content within the CMS, whereas before we would have had to reply on emails, spreadsheets and external tools to manage when content changes needed to be made, and by who (if we wanted to manage any kind of moderation pre-publication).”

Saving tax payer money

Finally, the all important question is, have the team been able to save money working with Contensis? Yes, they have!

“Investing in Contensis as a platform, including the development of a re-usable microsite theme, will save our organisation time, money and effort long-term.” says Andy Tipp.

“Instead of going out to procure a new website from a new supplier every time, key websites can be built on Contensis relatively quickly at low to no expense.”

“A typical small website might cost between £5,000 and £20,000 from the market, which is taxpayer money that can be saved if we create the site on Contensis using as much of the template, re-usable theme as possible.” says product owner and lead content designer Andy Tipp.

A web project to be proud of

“We’re really proud to have completed the project on time, under budget and to have delivered all our core objectives; our main website is now faster, more accessible, simpler and easier to use, and it’s more secure and reliable.”

“In addition to these achievements, we’re really proud of all the user research we did, and to have completed a complicated transition of both content and users (around 100 publishers and editors) to a brand new platform in an ambitious time-frame.”

“It’s been a great experience working with Zengenti. We quickly established a good rapport and continued to develop a good working relationship throughout the project. We feel we learned a lot from the Zengenti project squad, from methods and practices through to specific tools and software that can be used for project work.” Andy Tipp, Lead Content Designer, Suffolk County Council.