A digital hub for a fast-growing urban centre

As the second-largest city in British Columbia, and one of the fastest-growing municipalities in Canada, the City of Surrey’s flagship website redesign was no small project. The site needed to serve a quickly-growing population—providing the first touchpoint for engagement and delivering access to essential information for over half a million diverse citizens.

The project was complex: the city government includes many layers of stakeholders, and the site holds thousands of documents going back over more than a century. The new site also required a full slate of integrations, and needed to offer an intuitive experience for both visitors and staff, while maintaining necessary administrative constraints and structures. It was critical to find the right team for the job.

Domain7’s expertise matched the City’s digitally ambitious and forward-thinking plan. Our team is deeply experienced in digital for public service, with a multifaceted skill set. With Domain7, the City was partnering with a team who had over two decades of experience in facilitation, strategy, UX research, CMS and custom development. We had also worked closely with the City of Surrey before—first creating the digital platform that launched their Smart Cities bid, and then digitally transforming a manual, paper-based application process for building permits into an intuitive online experience. This redesign project was the type of partnership our team is built for.

As with most large government sites, content was a significant challenge. The site contained an enormous amount of content, including decades’ worth of documents, which needed to be migrated to the new site and fully searchable once live. Our developers created a series of scripts to automate moving the content into newly-created templates, iterating the scripts to adjust the content until it was perfectly situated. They also dug into search—a notoriously-difficult challenge for any large site—integrating the city’s existing third-party search platform seamlessly to ensure a consistent experience.

The authoring experience was another key content concern: creating and publishing content needed to be simple and intuitive for the City staff’s varying levels of technical expertise, but the process also needed to adhere to certain guidelines. By designing and developing a robust Drupal 8 CMS for the City, our team created a content editing experience that was significantly easier for staff, with greater access and flexibility for non-technical users. We used a components-based approach to ensure content consistency, and structured the authoring to work within organizational constraints. This means less micromanaging of content editors, and more efficient and responsive City communications.

As the project closes and the new site launches, The City of Surrey can be confident that it now offers its citizens a digital property befitting its motto: “The Future Lives Here.” Moving from a .NET site to an updated, redesigned Drupal 8 CMS, with robust custom integrations and intuitive authoring and user experiences, the new site is poised to become the digital centre of the Surrey community. It delivers sophisticated, service-oriented solutions to the contemporary city’s challenges, and situates Surrey as not just a municipal leader in Canada, but a digital one as well.