It’s been a while coming, but we are finally just a few days away from finally launching liverpool.gov.uk in umbraco.
it’s been a long journey - not really because of any technical reasons, more the political ones. Moving a website for a large organisation is never as easy as you think it should be, so many people want to make sure it’s going to be value for money, fit for purpose and does not get them into trouble.
Current liverpool.gov.uk
When we built the new liverpool.gov.uk in late 2010 we actually nearly went with umbraco then, we had only just started to experiment with it, and it looked like it fitted the bill - but we didn’t, we had 5 months to compleatly rebuild and remodle the website, and we didn’t think fitting a new CMS in as well would have worked.
the new liverpool.gov.uk
In hindsight we probably could have done it - umbraco is very well suited to how the we and site are setup - but i know the site we’ve now built is magnitudes better than it would have been if we had developed it back then… because we would have been learning on the fly, now we’ve had time to learn how best to do it.
So in the last 12 weeks, we have completely rebuilt the functionality of liverpool.gov.uk in umbraco, moved all of the content into the site, and made all those changes we’ve wanted to make but have been on hold while we waited for the new system.
It’s been a whirlwind development cycle, we had hoped to be more open with the process and the sit, but a couple of technical issues have stood in our way and i have one new piece of advice to add to my list, don’t let them move your office 8 weeks into a 12 week project.
As we emerge from the fog - I am hoping to build up more detail of how we built the site, but we already have quite a bit of information around and about.
Our lead CMS developer marc has been doing a good job of talking about the details of the migration and the delta.ldlwebservices.co.uk blog has some details of how the project has eveolved. so if you’re interested they are good places to start.
Here i want to flesh out some of the detail behind the decisions that make up the site, and how & why it all works the way it does. just need to get it live first.