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 their ability to find information about government services quickly – as well as over 100 communicators (who act as editors and publishers), depended on a new website.

“People were searching for our programs and services, and we were down on the list in search results,” remembers Anthony June, Application Manager at Macomb County. 

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

It took two years from the bid to launch. “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,” said June.  

Why Macomb County Returned to Pantheon and its legacy agency partner

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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. 

This renewed flexibility allowed the County to bring TEN7 back into the fold, a Drupal partner with which the team 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 100+ Content Contributors & Enhancing Accessibility Scores

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. 

“We expanded our page types,  improved page creation and made image and video handling simpler. This frees up our web developers to focus on the technical side of the site and reduces the need for content editors and publishers to reach out to our web team for help with posting content,” shared June. 

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.

In terms of accessibility, the new website was designed in compliance with the WCAG 2.0 with a site target goal of Level AA compliance based on government-industry benchmarks and best practices. The content changes 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. 

The Old-New Freedom and Flexibility on Pantheon

Getting re-established on the Pantheon platform enabled the web team of four to go back to using their favorite features.

Pantheon’s Multidev environment is key to our future success with our website project. Working with multiple web partners, while also operating with a full-service IT department with an outfitted web team, 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.” 

- Anthony June, Application Manager at Macomb County

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 new site went live in November 2023 without a hitch. The County Executive Mark Hackel highlighted the website redesign at his State of the County address, recognizing the importance of modernized digital government services.