Sector(s)
Team Members
Westminster City Council appointed Big Blue Door to take responsibility for hosting, support, maintenance and ongoing Drupal development across its corporate digital estate.
Working alongside the Council's digital, IT and service teams, Big Blue Door combines day-to-day operational support with a programme of planned improvements. The scope ranges from infrastructure and security updates to content management, custom functionality, data integration and specialist site development. Weekly reviews, shared delivery tracking and client testing help coordinate work across different services. The relationship also encompasses A Day to Remember, Homes for Westminster and the separate People First service delivered jointly with the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.
Business case and background
Westminster needed a partner capable of sustaining a busy public-service website while helping its digital estate evolve. As its previous hosting arrangement approached its end, the Council procured hosting, support and maintenance alongside a separate Drupal development service. Continuity, resilience, accessibility and collaboration with internal teams were central to the brief.
The challenge extended beyond infrastructure and server support. The estate included multiple sites, different service owners, existing integrations and ongoing content activity. The incoming partner needed to understand the inherited platform, coordinate the handover and support operational priorities while making room for new development.
Big Blue Door's role was to protect that existing investment and provide the capacity to improve it. This included UK-based AWS hosting, support processes, monitoring and a multidisciplinary Drupal team able to work with Council colleagues. The development programme supports Westminster's wider digital ambitions through practical changes: connecting data to public information, enabling engagement and keeping the platform maintainable as requirements change. Rather than treating each request as a separate website project, the partnership provides a continuing route from service need through development, testing and release.
About the project
Establishing a long-term delivery partnership
Big Blue Door began by coordinating the transfer of hosting and support with the outgoing supplier and Westminster's digital and IT teams. The hosting solution brought the estate onto UK-based AWS infrastructure with autoscaling, content delivery, backups, disaster recovery and monitoring. The transition was phased around site readiness and existing upgrade dependencies.
The ongoing delivery model combines a service desk with agreed development estimates, weekly reviews, shared tracking, quality assurance and Council testing. Slack supports day-to-day collaboration and urgent discussions. This gives service owners a route for both planned improvements and operational issues, with work prioritised across the estate.
Extending the corporate platform
Public engagement. Big Blue Door developed the budget consultation's “Balance the books” functionality using Drupal Webform functionality. Delivered in July 2026, it supports a staged survey through which residents can consider service priorities and financial choices. The template-based approach also gives editors a reusable starting point for future adaptations.
Automated data publishing. Big Blue Door implemented a replacement process for bringing Westminster's air-quality data files into Drupal. The integration retrieves files through the Council's API and updates the media library, with requirements to preserve metadata and existing page links. This work supports daily updating without editors repeatedly replacing downloads by hand.
Waste-service information. The team developed a CSV-based import and lookup capability around Westminster's street-level collection data. The work addresses a different need from a conventional postcode-only bin-day finder, accommodating collection times, waste streams and street-cleaning information.
Economic development. Big Blue Door also delivered the first phase of a business/landlord matchmaking platform - this project brings together business profiles, application journeys and supporting resources, with further development being scoped as a subsequent phase.
Supporting the wider estate
The partnership includes specialist digital services as well as the corporate site. Big Blue Door redesigned and rebuilt A Day to Remember, Westminster's ceremonies website, with the Council leading its content work. The service presents venues and ceremony information through its own distinct design, linking users onward to the separate booking service.
For Homes for Westminster, ongoing work includes platform maintenance, a Drupal 11 upgrade and analytics configuration. The separate People First project demonstrates a broader part of the relationship: Big Blue Door rebuilt the shared Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea care-information service on LocalGov Drupal and continues to support its development.
Milestones and results
Recent milestones include air-quality integration sign-off and the budget consultation release, along with Drupal 11 upgrades across all platforms.
The result is a continuing service that combines infrastructure, support and development with practical additions to the Council's digital offer. Westminster has gained automated publishing capability, a configurable consultation tool and access to a team able to maintain and extend several related Drupal services. Follow-up fixes and service refinements remain part of normal delivery. The project demonstrates the value of Drupal beyond an initial launch: an existing platform can continue to support new requirements through careful stewardship and sustained development.
Why Drupal was chosen
Drupal was already established at Westminster when Big Blue Door was appointed. The focus of this engagement was therefore to maintain and extend the Council's existing Drupal investment. It was not a new CMS selection or a rebuild of the corporate website.
The platform offered the flexibility needed for this continuing programme. Drupal's content structures and media management could support published information alongside data-driven services, while its form capabilities provided a foundation for more specialised interactions. Big Blue Door could add functionality within the existing estate and work alongside Council editors and developers who were already familiar with it.
The air-quality publishing work illustrates that fit: data files from Westminster's systems can be brought into Drupal's media library and made available through existing information pages. The budget consultation demonstrates a different use of the same platform, extending Webform to support a structured public engagement journey.
Drupal also provided a route for ongoing technical renewal. Big Blue Door upgraded the corporate site to Drupal 11 in August 2026, with client testing and follow-up work incorporated into the delivery programme. Across the partnership, the emphasis is on extending the useful life of an open-source platform through maintenance, integration and targeted development, while preserving continuity for the teams responsible for its content and services.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Big Blue Door's approach was to extend the inherited Drupal implementation and its established Westminster theme, selecting additional functionality around specific service needs. Webforms provided a reusable foundation for the budget consultation: its template-based implementation allows the Council to clone and adapt forms within Drupal. Drupal's media library supports the air-quality integration, with custom import work designed to update source files while preserving the surrounding publishing structure. Existing LocalGov Drupal content patterns and reusable components also form part of the estate, allowing enhancements to build on familiar editorial structures. These choices balance reuse with targeted custom development, retaining the Council's visual identity while adding capabilities where standard publishing tools alone would not meet the requirement.
