Macomb County, MI

Home to almost a million people, Macomb County is the third largest in Michigan. With the ever-increasing public demand for online services, the County’s flagship website, macombgov.org, needed a redesign to enhance user experience, speed up mobile interactions and meet new federal standards for accessibility. 

A diverse team of stakeholders was assembled, including representatives from the Executive Office, the Planning and Economic Development Department and the IT team. The stakes were high. The public at large and over 100 communicators (who act as editors and publishers) depended on a new website.

It took six months for the project to be completed – impressive compared to average industry cycles lasting a year or even longer.  

People were searching for our programs and services, and we were down on the list in search results. On the new site, we saw large gains in search engine optimization, especially on mobile. We were no longer trailing industry benchmarks for a government website.” 

- Anthony June, Application Manager at Macomb County

Why Macomb County Returned to Pantheon and its legacy agency partner

Image

When the County first announced the bid for a website redesign, its Drupal 8 property was already on Pantheon and supported by our agency partner TEN7. A different agency won the bid and took macombgov.org off Pantheon, to a proprietary hosting service. The County migrated to Drupal 9 and began the redesign process. 

One year before the launch, the County went back to Pantheon. To better meet their needs, they sought additional technical features and wanted direct access to the code. Retaining ownership over their WebOps platform allowed the County’s team more flexibility to work with multiple web partners. 

The County also brought TEN7 back into the fold, a Drupal partner with whom they had prior success. TEN7 first performed a series of discrete audits to uncover any remaining issues with UX design, accessibility, content workflows and permissions, and front- and backend code. Through this process of deep learning and understanding, TEN7 made multiple improvement recommendations across the board, solving the County’s pressing content management concerns. They also helped uncover and solve caching problems, main navigation and image responsiveness, and poor performance on tablets.  

Enabling 120 Content Editors at Scale

Macomb County didn't just modernize its website – they fundamentally transformed how content gets published. The team grew from 60 content editors to over 120, doubling their publishing capacity without adding IT staff.

"This idea that you have to be in IT to update a web page – I don't think so," said June. "If you can edit a Word document, you can edit the website. It's that easy."

The key was implementing Drupal's Group module, which ensures editors only see content and media from their assigned department. This prevents accidental cross-department edits while giving business users full ownership of their pages.

The results were immediate: help desk tickets dropped 50%, with most of that reduction coming from content publishing requests. "We're freed up to do more things like maintain the site, worry about accessibility, work on the back end," June explained. "My two web developers can focus on being developers, not content publishers."

To support this expanded editor base, Macomb County established a comprehensive governance framework:

• Monthly training sessions for onboarding and refreshers.
• Quarterly contributor meetings to align all editors.
• Brand standards and writing guides to maintain consistency.
• Content moderation workflows for departments that need review/approval processes.

"We challenged our content editors to take ownership," June noted. "It's your responsibility to keep this website fed with relevant, up-to-date information." This shift in mindset: from IT-managed to department-owned content, was transformative for the organization.

Self-service was a key success indicator for the County’s technical group. They wanted to empower their Drupal users with page features and paragraph types that would provide flexibility to create well-organized web content. 

To enhance Drupal learning and empower the content team, the County did not automate the migration process to Drupal 10. Content creators had to evaluate about 2,500 pages and 15,000 PDF files and make editorial decisions to improve content quality, accessibility and website performance.

As a result of publishing smarter and faster, web traffic has climbed to over 350,000 monthly visitors.

Enhancing Accessibility Scores

The new website was designed in compliance with WCAG 2.0, with a site target goal of Level AA compliance based on government-industry benchmarks and best practices. The content audit and enhanced quality made the site more accessible and compliant with industry recommendations. Siteimprove crawls the County’s website every 5 days for performance and quality feedback. 

“Our old site was previously trailing the government benchmark at 80.4 on the AA level. Our current site is at 86.2 on the AA level, which now puts us above the government benchmark,” said June. 

Gaining Technical Freedom and Flexibility on Pantheon

Operating as part of a full-service IT department, the web team also works with multiple web partners. Efficient collaboration is a must. 

“Pantheon’s Multidev environment is key to our future success with our website project. We can fork the stack to test modules or new features. All while our web partner can work on some site fixes and updates simultaneously. We are all established on the GitHub workflow, so we can work efficiently with multiple teams,” said June.

Elevating awareness of county services is the ultimate goal for the web team. To serve as an efficient and secure platform requires a lot of experimentation and testing. That’s where Pantheon’s Dev, Test, Live workflow comes in. The Dev and Test environments benefit QA reviews and testing and serve as a fall-back space in case content on Live needs to be easily and quickly retrieved. 

The website is a great success. This was a huge undertaking for our communicators. The current site is a credit to their dedication and effort to bring our web presence forward." 

- Anthony June, Application Manager at Macomb County