Mecklenburg County

The Client

Located in North Carolina, Mecklenburg County is more than just a great place to work. The County provides an environment where people can touch and enrich lives every day in countless ways. From helping families in need to protecting the public's health and even maintaining hundreds of acres of public park land, Mecklenburg County employees play a vital role in providing services for an amazingly diverse population.

The Situation

Mecklenburg County had an outdated content management system (CMS) that did not allow its team members to easily create content or create the types of experiences they wanted for their constituents. The County needed an easy-to-maintain system that could deliver a compelling website experience while meeting accessibility requirements.

The Challenge

Each Mecklenburg County department needed its own separate web experience, and some content needed to be centrally managed while other content was managed at the department level and rolled up to the county level. The County’s new system needed to support content sharing between the sites in a way that was intuitive to authors.

With accessibility as a key driving factor for the new experience, the County wanted to use the United States Web Design System (USWDS), a design system created for federal sites to ensure accessibility. However, the County library didn't want to leverage the USWDS system; instead, it wanted a system that was optimized for content authors, giving them a very flexible component system and drag-and-drop editor to build up the necessary page experiences. 

The system the County chose needed to support both of these approaches.

The Solution

Partnering with Perficient, the team's first task was to deploy Acquia Campaign Studio to replace a non-compliant email tool. With Acquia Campaign Studio in place, the County immediately realized a significant return on investment even as the rest of its site experiences were being designed and built.

Perficient established a design system and component library for the County site (using USWDS) and the library. As a part of building its architectural approach, the team decided to use Acquia Site Factory and Datum, an extension of Drupal Layout Builder, to create the County site and to build the library site on a separate instance of Drupal using Acquia Site Studio. This ensured that the organizations had their own independent roadmaps. 

For the library, Acquia Site Studio empowered the team to quickly build a component library and authoring experience that allows authors to easily create compelling experiences. The site integrates with BiblioCommons for both catalog and events, delivering a full customer experience.

For the County, Acquia Site Factory allowed the team to create a single component system that still lets the authoring team build department sites as needed. Leveraging Datum allowed Perficient to author components that met USWDS's rigid requirements and evaluated for accessibility in real time, all within Storybook.

Utilizing Acquia Content Hub, Perficient developed a content-sharing model that created a central content repository used on every site, ensuring that content, such as a privacy policy, can be authored once and distributed everywhere. In addition, the team structured other content, like events, to be composed within the local site and shared with the rolled-up organization sites to ensure that users have the information they need, regardless of the site they are on.

The teams implemented Acquia DAM to provide one single repository for media assets that are shared and managed across 50+ websites. They also use Acquia DAM images within Acquia Campaign Studio emails.

The Results

With the new platform in place, the County now has a modern, user-centric set of websites with accessible design, robust search across all websites, improved core web vitals, and easy content authoring. Reduced content maintenance for county administrators means that users receive more accurate information. And the library's modern design system integrates with other systems, creating a single experience and enabling the library to continue evolving its digital experience.