Bruges: Revamping the Website for a Citizen-Centric Future

The next step was to cre­ate a sys­tem for Bruges that allows city admin­is­tra­tors to man­age mul­ti­ple web­sites from one Dru­pal con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem. This set­up is called a mul­ti-site dis­tri­b­u­tion, which means that dif­fer­ent web­sites can be man­aged togeth­er, but each site can still have its own con­tent and unique fea­tures. Com­mu­ni­ca­tion experts from dif­fer­ent city depart­ments can cre­ate and update their own web­site pages while keep­ing every­thing cross-web­site con­sis­tent. Using flex­i­ble com­po­nents, they can to cus­tomise con­tent while main­tain­ing a uni­fied design and lay­out. This scal­able approach not only sim­pli­fies con­tent cre­ation for all staff in com­mu­ni­ca­tion teams, but also sup­ports Bruges’ over­all dig­i­tal growth and future needs.

To keep track of user behav­iour, we pro­posed the Euro­pean web ana­lyt­ics soft­ware Mato­mo, which col­lects user data in a secure and GDPR-com­pli­ant man­ner. With this set­up, the core project team at Bruges’ is able to track and analyse web vis­i­tors, gath­er­ing insights to opti­mise the web­site in the future.

Implementation

The design and devel­op­ment process required inten­sive and con­struc­tive col­lab­o­ra­tion between city employ­ees and Hype­r­i­on. We achieved this by using the Agile method­ol­o­gy backed with the project man­age­ment soft­ware JIRA. Our joint efforts were sup­port­ed by week­ly core team meet­ings, month­ly steer­ing com­mit­tee meet­ings, and week­ly on-site pres­ence to make sure team Bruges kept track of our progress and offered feed­back and sug­ges­tions at the right time in development.

Build­ing towards the launch of the web­site, our UX design­ers, devel­op­ers and mar­ke­teers worked togeth­er con­stant­ly to con­nect all dots con­sid­er­ing user expe­ri­ence, site per­for­mance and search engine opti­mi­sa­tion (SEO).

The mar­ket­ing data experts at Hype­r­i­on made sure the ana­lyt­ics tool Mato­mo was imple­ment­ed cor­rect­ly, tak­ing care of the more tech­ni­cal part of data capturing.

Prac­ti­cal train­ing ses­sions famil­iarised employ­ees of Bruges’ with this data ana­lyt­ics tool, offer­ing hands-on expe­ri­ence and a handy play­book to con­fi­dent­ly start analysing user behaviour.