LocalGov Drupal: A winning CMS for UK council websites

What are the benefits of LocalGov Drupal?

1. Low cost

With no licence fees to pay, and being free and open source, LocalGov Drupal means you can have a best-in-class, enterprise-grade website for your council at a fraction of the price of a licenced, proprietary website. And remember, you’ll pay that licence before a line of code is written to develop the website to your brand guidelines. Meaning, with LocalGov Drupal, budget is freed up to spend on other services for the homeless, health, education, etc.

2. Rigorously tested

Since LocalGov Drupal is a collaboration between a number of councils and development agencies, it’s well-tested before any new feature is released. More, you have the reassurance of knowing that each feature has an automated test suite alongside it, developed by some of the best Drupal developers in the world.

As well as that, you can see for yourself websites built on the codebase – Brighton-Hove, Cumbria, Bracknell Forest, Croydon, and many more. And being open source, you can have your in-house developers download it and validate the codebase.

3. WCAG 2.1 AA compliant

LocalGov Drupal is built with accessibility at the core. Each feature is tested from a number of accessibility standpoints and WCAG 2.1 AA criteria. We want to ensure everyone can use our websites fully, whether they have accessibility requirements or not.

4. Faster development time

As the features you need for your council website are already built and ready to go, development turnaround time is much faster. Typically, creating a new council website can often take up to a year. However, LocalGov Drupal websites are typically launched in only 8 to 12 weeks.

And, with a shared feature set, the development budget is mostly used creating the look and feel of your website (called “frontend development” – fonts, colours, spacing, etc). Given Annertech were tasked with writing the base frontend system for the platform, who better to implement it on your council website.

5. No vendor lock-in

As an open-source product, there is no vendor lock-in with LocalGov Drupal. You do not need to sign up for a licence for any period of time. If you want to take your website and have another development agency work on it, you are free to do so. You own the codebase at all times. All you’ll need is another Drupal specialist.

6. Share features

Collaborating with others means we learn from one another. Through LocalGov Drupal you have access to people who have solved a problem you’re currently experiencing.  

What if you want a feature that isn’t available yet? Simply send a proposal to the product working group. If your proposal is accepted (i.e., it’s a feature lots of councils will use), we will work on it. If it is not accepted (perhaps it’s very specific to your council), you are free to work on it yourself and maintain it for just your website. Also, you could  share it with the smaller number of councils that will need that feature.