The Challenge
The North Dakota Department of Transportation (NDDOT) oversees the state’s roads and highways, as well as issues driver’s licenses. The NDDOT system has more miles of road per capita than any other state in the United States and more registered vehicles than residents of the state. GovWebworks was selected by the State of North Dakota, Information Technology Department as a technology vendor via a public RFP and we worked with North Dakota Department of Health and Human Services in 2022. That same year, NDDOT enlisted our services to consolidate the agency’s public website and intranet from multiple interdependent web applications and websites to make it easier for internal staff to administer content directly and restructure content layouts and sitemaps.
Our Approach
The NDDOT Website Uplift project was a phased implementation of the new NDDOT public website and intranet using the underlying North Dakota State Website Platform and a Drupal 9 Web Content Management System. GovWebworks provided project management, business analysis, UX, design, content strategy, content migration, and quality assurance services. As a part of the scope, we accomplished legacy site analysis, infrastructure auditing, and information architecture redevelopment. We also provided extensive analysis and consultation regarding the optimal use of structural components and features that the Department would have at its disposal within the new Drupal instance. A substantial portion of the efforts entailed rigorous, systematic mapping of legacy content to new page and component types. We liaised with the States’ central IT office to request/negotiate further architectural enhancements when they would prove beneficial. Upon reaching consensus around the structural approach, we then executed duties relative to the actual transfer and scrubbing of hundreds of source pages to transform the content for the new site.
The Result
The updated site is an attractive, sustainable new presence that conforms cleanly and pristinely to the State’s unified styling. The uplift significantly improves usability for site visitors, making it easy to find information about road safety, driver’s licenses and education, and updates on North Dakota’s extensive network of highways. All work was accomplished in accordance with an Agile methodology, and the project was completed on time and within the pricing quoted to the customer. The third and final phase of the project is underway with a similar mission to transform the department’s intranet site.
