Gemert-Bakel Municipality

The Client

The website for the municipality of Gemert-Bakel, located in the southern Netherlands, plays a vital role in providing residents with relevant and up-to-date information, such as procedures for renewing driving licenses or passports. The website also offers a wide range of services to residents, including requesting garbage drop-offs and filing complaints conveniently from their homes. 

The Situation

Rob van der Broek serves as the webmaster/functional manager for the municipality of Gemert-Bakel. As an online city hall, the municipality’s website must ensure easy and efficient access to information, forms, and online services for all residents. While van der Broek and his colleagues recognized the importance of providing an inclusive and productive website – including efficiency gains  from reducing the time spent on answering inquiries via phone and email – they lacked visibility into the state of accessibility of their website and faced various challenges to manage the workload associated with serving an entire online community. 

The Challenge

In order to achieve their goals, the Gemert-Bakel Municipality first wanted to prioritize web accessibility compliance and ensure inclusivity by providing understandable information for all residents. They also had to tackle the frustration experienced by residents when they encountered links that were either broken or led to the wrong information, as well as the appearance of broken images caused by the uploading of oversized images. Lastly, they faced the challenge of making all documents accessible, as many content writers were unfamiliar with accessibility requirements.

Asset reference

The Solution

The Gemert-Bakel Municipality ultimately chose Acquia Optimize as its preferred solution due to three core factors: Acquia Optimize’s comprehensive overview of website health, its affordability, and the user-friendly interface.

The Acquia Optimize solutions Gemert-Bakel implemented to overcome their challenges and enhance website accessibility and inclusivity included:

• The Accessibility module to help the team identify and fix accessibility issues, including PDF remediation, to ensure equal access to public information for residents
• The Quality Assurance module to fix broken links and images, correct misspellings, and improve content readability
• The Policy module to establish a rule to detect and notify the team of the upload of oversized images, ensuring optimal display 
• The Heartbeat module to help proactively identify and resolve any website downtime issues 
• The Acquia Optimize browser extension to facilitate the identification of broken links and misspellings, streamlining collaboration among content writers 

Moreover, Acquia Optimize's relative affordability made it an instantly attractive solution – an understandably crucial factor for a public organization with tight budgetary constraints.

The Results

Acquia Optimize offered an invaluable tool that provided van der Broek and his team with a comprehensive overview of their website's health and significantly streamlined the municipality’s overall website maintenance. 

First and foremost, the Acquia Optimize platform played a crucial role in enhancing website accessibility by allowing van der Broek and his team to quickly and easily identify and resolve web health issues, ensuring that all residents could access information and services without encountering barriers. Acquia Optimize also helped the municipality maintain high-quality content throughout the website, including the identification of several remediation issues that had previously plagued the municipality’s catalogue of documents and reports.

The Acquia Optimize browser extension enabled the team to identify and resolve issues directly within the municipality’s content management system (CMS), saving substantial time and effort. The tool is particularly useful during accessibility audits, as it allows the team to document their progress and track efforts made to improve website accessibility.

In addition, van der Broek and his team found that the industry-leading Acquia Optimize platform provided valuable insights into the popularity of the municipality's different webpages, thus enabling the development of more targeted content catering specifically to areas and subjects that piqued resident interest. This continuous assessment of visitor trends has led to the creation of content that is more responsive and tailored to residents’ needs, boosting the website’s user experience and the reputation of the municipality itself.