How Government Websites Can Leverage Drupal To Enhance User Experience?

Introduction

In 2004, Drupal was probably first utilized for a government-related website or project. Built on Drupal, CivicSpace was the backbone of Howard Dean's successful web-based presidential campaign.

Since then, Drupal has seen significantly evolving. Open-source content management systems and other forms of digital innovation are now widely used by government organizations around the globe. They're using Drupal today to get the word out, help the public understand what the agency is all about, and improve the efficiency of internal processes and communications.

Drupal's open-source nature and features, such as security, cost-effectiveness, high performance, simple content administration, etc., make it the best choice for governments to create potent and trustworthy digital experiences, and it already powers millions of government websites.

The Role of Drupal in Government

Drupal is widely used by national governments, powering over 150 of them. It was selected in 2009 to serve as the foundation for WhiteHouse.gov and any affiliated sites. This probably lent an air of trust and assurance to the open-source platform and prompted additional government agencies to adopt it. Over the subsequent years, Drupal has been the preferred platform of many well-known institutions for developing complex, data-adapted systems. It stands out among other CMSs because of its exceptional open-source community and cutting-edge features.

What are the advantages of Drupal?

Drupal is a popular content management system, and it offers several benefits to government agencies in the process of building and maintaining a CMS platform.

Advantages such as these are what make Drupal such a strong foundation upon which to build a government-focused CMS platform.

• Since Drupal is open source and free, there is no need to pay for a license.
• There is no need to sign a lock-in contract with the service provider, so you are free to shop around. The government can form a team to improve the features on their own time now that the source code is public.
• Due to its active support community, frequent patch releases, and dedication to its road plan, Drupal is simple to upgrade and update.
• Drupal's scalability and modular design make it simple to manage, incorporate with existing infrastructure, and expand upon.
• Integrating with other bespoke Drupal apps is a breeze when code is written in accordance with Drupal's coding standards, allowing for reusability.
• Community-oriented by decreasing time and money spent on managing and updating websites.
• With Atomic Design, all of the layout's atomic components are meticulously prepared to ensure a uniform brand experience for all users. The brand's individuality is protected through templates built from these parts. Additionally, the parts may be recycled into other designs. This can facilitate site access by creating a sense of familiarity with iconography and layouts across several sites of a department or ministry.
• Modular components that are built with the normal content publishing needs of a government agency in mind save complexity and duplicated labor.
• With a simple interface that allows for frequent updates, content creators may be brought on board quickly. Changing it doesn't require any specialized knowledge or skills.
• Drupal's Multisite functionality makes it simple to oversee a network of sites. Allows for consistent data without requiring two separate updates of material.
• Safer websites thanks to shared blueprints and tried-and-trued source code
• Modular and functional updates may be rolled out automatically.

Why Drupal ought to be the choice of CMS for government websites?

Mobility

Mobile device traffic to websites has long outpaced that from desktop computers. Actually, one in five American adults use just their smartphones to access the internet, and that percentage is expected to rise in the future, as reported by the Pew Research Center. With an ever-increasing mobile user base, government websites must prioritize a seamless mobile experience to cater to consumers of all ages and socioeconomic backgrounds.

To that end, Drupal is available. Drupal 8 was developed to work well with a broad variety of mobile devices, so it can scale as your user base grows, as well as load mobile content quickly and provide a variety of responsive themes. In addition, Drupal enables content editors to contribute or update site material from their mobile devices, which is very useful for making last-minute changes from remote locations.

Safety

Maintaining credibility and user confidence necessitates providing a safe and secure website for their personal information and other data. Regular patches, visible notices of update availability, and extra security modules are just a few of Drupal's many security features. In contrast to other open source platforms, Drupal maintains a security committee that actively monitors for vulnerabilities and works to improve security standards for the platform as a whole.

Easily Reachable

Multiple laws at the national, state, and municipal levels mandate that all residents, regardless of ability, have access to and use government websites. If your team is building a website, making sure it complies with accessibility standards from the get-go will save time and money in the long run.

Drupal's publishing experience, along with all of its other features and services, are designed to be fully accessible in accordance with WCAG and ADA standards. Meaning that everyone, regardless of ability, can use your Drupal website for things like content creation and editing, news reading, and form filling. By default, Drupal ensures that text is accurately interpreted by screen readers, makes recommendations for accessible color contrast and intensity, generates pictures and forms that are accessible, and has skip navigation in its core themes.

A straightforward method for managing content

The content editor in Drupal is almost as straightforward and familiar as working with a Word document, which is ideal for the busy government website managers who need to add new articles, pages, and resources. The WYSIWYG editor allows you to make changes to the text without having to switch to a separate code editor.

Drupal also allows for the creation of unique administrative roles, permissions, and content pipelines. Because of this, we may have as many people as we like working on the site without losing editorial control.

Able to accommodate large amounts of data and traffic

Due to seasonal demand, news cycles, and other considerations, many government websites retain large amounts of data and resources and see considerable surges in traffic. One further reason Drupal should be used for government websites is its ability to handle massive datasets and high volumes of traffic.

With Drupal's module structure, it's possible to customize the database to meet the demands of practically any content library without writing any more code.

Many popular websites, such as NBC's Olympic coverage, the Grammy Awards website, and Weather.com, are powered by Drupal, which allows them to remain stable even under heavy load.

Possessing a Modest Mindset

The useful components that are now a part of Drupal core are only the beginning. Many more modules have been developed and tested by the Drupal community and are available for integration with your site. How many are there? With over 40,000 modules already provided by the Drupal community, it's a fair chance that one of them will be able to accommodate your project's specific requirements.

Add modules to your site whenever you like, much like Legos. Popular ones include those for social media, picture editing, calendars, metatags, and connecting to third-party services like email providers and client databases.

Cost-effectiveness

It's not uncommon for government spending to be constrained because there are many causes vying for limited resources. With Drupal, you have access to a free, open-source system backed by a sizable group of dedicated programmers. By developing your website on an open-source platform, you may save money that would have been spent on software license costs and instead invest it in providing a first-rate experience for your inhabitants through services like content planning, user experience design, and more. Plus, you may save even more money by not having to write any new code thanks to Drupal's versatile modules.

To facilitate the use of several sites in various languages, number eight is the provision for this functionality.

Many government agencies today operate more than one online presence. Building each site individually would be incredibly time- and cost-consuming whether your government maintains a few sites or hundreds. Thanks to Drupal's multisite functionality, it's possible to quickly and easily replicate your site's functionality over an unlimited number of subdomains. Drupal provides Content and Entity Translation modules to let content producers translate pages, elements, or fields into over a hundred languages to accommodate linguistic needs.

Drupal as a core component of website development

Since Drupal 8, Drupal has entered a rapid improvement period. Every six months, we get a new release that is compatible with the previous version thanks to semantic versioning and platform modernization. It has progressed into a highly scalable platform, enabling the development of websites capable of receiving millions of hits without seeing any degradation in speed or performance. It's adaptable, so you can add new features and manage massive amounts of data with ease. Excellent content production options, including in-built WYSIWYG editors, and a mobile-first design philosophy characterize the underlying architecture. Drupal's ability to integrate with best-of-breed technologies to provide the top digital experience and its adaptability in content distribution make it a natural fit for the API economy.

Conclusion

It is essential for businesses in today's digital market to provide individualized user experiences in order to keep up with rising customer expectations. That's why it's crucial now more than ever to prioritize mobile and answer consumer inquiries promptly. Government websites need to use a content management system (CMS) that seamlessly connects with the expectations of their consumers since people anticipate more engaging and interactive components in every web experience. Although there are numerous content management systems out there, many popular businesses have chosen Drupal to create a web app that helps them increase efficiency. Contact our experts to know more!