Sector(s)
Team Members
Worcestershire County Council needed a modern website that made its services easier to navigate and better reflected life in the county. Big Blue Door delivered a bespoke Drupal 9 build, with the main website launching in February 2023 following discovery, design, development and launch preparation during 2022–23.
The wider estate includes branded "Level 2" sites within the corporate Drupal installation and a separate Worcestershire Pension Fund website. The partnership subsequently extended to Our Space, a Drupal intranet accessed through single sign-on.
Big Blue Door provides ongoing AWS hosting, support and maintenance across these services, alongside further development. The corporate website uses bespoke Drupal; its Level 2 capability was developed for Worcestershire’s requirements.
Business case and background
The previous Jadu platform had become restrictive for the Council’s web team. Content needed reviewing, and the Council wanted greater flexibility in how it presented information. Improving the website meant considering both the experience of residents looking for services and the needs of editors managing a substantial body of content.
The Council also wanted its website to act as a window into the county. A refreshed visual design needed to support everyday tasks while giving news, events and local activity an appropriate place alongside service information.
There was a wider estate to consider too. Individual services had their own identities and established web addresses. Bringing them into the new platform required a way to preserve their branding and organise their content without creating an entirely separate installation for every service.
The later intranet project introduced a complementary requirement: apply the value of the corporate Drupal build to an internal audience, with its own identity and authenticated access. Together, these needs made the work a continuing platform partnership, covering public information, specialist audiences and staff communications.
About the project
Designing around real tasks
Big Blue Door worked with stakeholders to understand where the existing website caused difficulty and what different audiences needed to achieve. The discovery programme involved more than 65 stakeholder workshop participants, seven card-sorting exercises and ten user-testing sessions.
Personas, user journeys and analytics informed the proposed information architecture. Wireframes made navigation ideas tangible early, allowing the team to refine menu structures before completing the visual design. Mobile use was an important consideration throughout, with content and design patterns developed for smaller screens.
The Council’s content work ran alongside design and development. This allowed the replacement to address how information was organised and presented, as well as how the website looked.
One corporate platform, distinct service identities
Big Blue Door implemented Level 2 sites within the main Drupal installation. These give individual services a recognisable identity and their own navigation, while retaining a clear relationship with the Council.
Let’s Waste Less provides an entry point to recycling and waste-reduction information. Ceremonies brings together venue discovery and information for people planning an occasion. Education and Early Years Services addresses schools, childcare settings and education professionals. Each has a different purpose, but all sit within the corporate platform.
The Pension Fund website takes a separate-installation approach. Its branding and information architecture address employers, employees, deferred members and pensioners, with routes to guidance, forms and the member portal.
Extending the investment to Our Space
Following the public website project, Big Blue Door developed the Our Space intranet using the corporate Drupal build as its starting point. The intranet received its own name and visual treatment, with single sign-on providing authenticated staff access.
This approach reused an established foundation while allowing the intranet to develop separately. The proposal explicitly separated the two codebases, so future changes to one would not automatically be introduced into the other.
Managing delivery and launch
The project was managed through an agile approach, with regular development updates, weekly project reviews, shared feedback and monthly governance reporting. Access to a staging environment allowed the Council to review work as it progressed.
Mobilisation took place in early 2022, with the kick-off meeting in March. Design, development and content preparation continued through the year. The main site launched in February 2023, followed by further refinements and the later intranet work.
Launch planning accounted for dependencies across the estate. The corporate domain and its Level 2 sites needed a coordinated transition, while the Pension Fund was moving to its own domain and Drupal installation. Big Blue Door and the Council planned DNS changes, redirects and the handling of established friendly URLs to support that transition. Post-launch reviews included page-not-found monitoring and further fixes.
Outcome and ongoing partnership
The Council now has a bespoke Drupal website with branded service areas, a separate Pension Fund website and an authenticated staff intranet. This resolves the need to serve distinct audiences and identities through a maintainable set of Drupal services.
Big Blue Door continues to host the estate on AWS and provide support, maintenance and development. Recent project records show security updates across the intranet and Pension Fund, deployed chatbot-code changes on the corporate site and continuing prioritisation of improvements. Ongoing work also includes supporting editors and reviewing accessibility issues as the sites evolve.
The lasting result is a platform the Council can continue to adapt: shared where that supports efficient management, and separate where an audience or service needs its own website.
Why Drupal was chosen
The Council needed more flexibility than its existing Jadu implementation provided. Drupal offered a foundation for structured content, reusable page components and editorial workflows that could be adapted to Worcestershire’s requirements.
During mobilisation, Big Blue Door and the Council discussed a packaged Drupal approach alongside a bespoke build. The delivered solution used Drupal 9 as the basis for a tailored platform. This supported the Council’s ambition for a distinctive website and the practical requirement to manage branded service areas within it.
The Level 2 model illustrates the fit particularly well. A service can have its own logo, colours and navigation while its pages remain within the corporate Drupal installation. Editors can manage these service identities using a shared platform, rather than maintaining an independent website for each one. Examples range from recycling guidance to education services and ceremonies.
Drupal also supported reuse beyond the public website. Our Space was developed from a copy of the corporate build, with its own branding and intranet requirements. It then became a separate codebase, allowing internal and public services to evolve independently. Single sign-on connects staff access to the Council’s organisational identity system.
This combination of shared foundations and tailored experiences made Drupal suitable for the estate as a whole. Big Blue Door can maintain the underlying technology and continue developing it as the Council’s content, services and editorial needs change.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
