GovWebworks overhauled the Washington Department of Social and Health Services website — implementing Drupal, creating a unified design, and migrating over 13,000 web pages from more than a dozen sub-agencies in six months, on budget and ahead of schedule, with a focus on citizen needs and improved service delivery.
The Challenge
The Washington Department of Social and Health Services is one of the largest state agencies in the country, operating programs across behavioral health, long-term care, juvenile rehabilitation, developmental disabilities, and dozens of other service areas — each with its own web presence developed independently over years. The result was a fragmented digital landscape of more than a dozen sub-agency sites with inconsistent design, navigation, and technology. DSHS needed to consolidate this sprawl into a unified platform that centered the experience on what Washington residents needed to access services.
Our Approach
GovWebworks led the consolidation on Drupal, treating the scale of the project — 13,000+ pages across more than a dozen sub-agencies — as a content strategy and migration challenge as much as a technical one. A unified design was developed to give all DSHS programs a consistent visual identity and navigation framework while accommodating the genuine functional differences between program areas. Solr-powered search was implemented to make the depth of DSHS’s content library findable across the consolidated site. Content migration was planned and executed systematically to ensure accuracy and preserve the connections between programs and services that Washington residents depended on.
The Result
The consolidated DSHS website launched in six months — on budget and ahead of schedule — giving Washington residents a single destination for accessing the department’s broad range of social and health services. The unified design and navigation reduced the confusion of navigating a dozen inconsistently-designed sub-sites. The successful delivery timeline demonstrated GovWebworks’ capacity to execute large-scale government web consolidations at the speed and quality that state agencies need.
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