Hennepin County Website

Background

High Monkey was engaged by Hennepin County to implement a website design created by another digital agency for the main County website and approximately two dozen other County websites. HM created a collation of partners that included Atomic Data (for website hosting), Sitecore (for CMS) and Coveo (for search engine) that worked together to successfully launch the main County website in December 2013.

Project type: Public Website Platform: Sitecore

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Goals

One of Hennepin County's primary goals was to design, build, test, and launch the new County website in a span of 8 months in order to reduce costs by converting to the Sitecore CMS platform. The website had to be designed with a template-based or modular approach that would allow the County to duplicate and re-use page layouts, content widgets, navigation elements, and the like across multiple websites.

Another goal was to improve the search experience for website visitors through an improved content strategy, search strategy, and the seamless integration of Coveo search within the Sitecore website environment. There was a significant amount of content to be moved into the Sitecore platform for the County's website. High Monkey provided a SharePoint based migration tool and guidance on use of metadata to ensure that the website's content would be findable by the Coveo Search platform.

Challenges

Conducting a content inventory of the entire website
Setting up High Monkey’s SharePoint-based content migration tracking tool
Training the County staff on the process steps for content migration into the new CMS, Sitecore
Identification of content metadata and establishing standards for content searchability
Identify and prioritize content for mobile access
Document content governance standards
Work with the County technical team to install and configure Sitecore and Coveo
Adapt existing designs into the Sitecore CMS framework
Functional and ADA compliance testing

Services Required

Accessibility and Content Compliance

Search and Content Strategy

UX and DX Design

Website Design and Build

Solution

High Monkey worked with a vendor partner to provide infrastructure to host and support the website. We implemented the Sitecore CMS platform and the Coveo search engine and built out the website within the new infrastructure. The goal of the project was to build, maintain, and host a state-of-the-art website that ensures top performance and quality service to the public – at any time, from any device. Using custom .NET user controls High Monkey created site functionality to read from the Sitecore CMS to render pages using a modular approach where content is be stored in different formats and displayed in various ways.

Using custom .NET user controls written with C# we created site functionality to read from the Sitecore CMS to render pages using a modular approach where content can be stored in different formats and displayed in different ways.

High Monkey created multiple content templates to insert content that would render the HTML output for content pages. The approach High Monkey took during the build process allowed for unique design and customizations for future County websites while still retaining a consistency for site layouts and a modular approach for managing content.

The hennepin.us website was launched in December 2013.