Improving Digital Services for Yukon Residents

Evolving Web collaborates with the Government of Yukon and its eServices team to provide long-term support and continuous improvements to its Drupal-based digital platform Yukon.ca, as well as advancing its digital content strategy. We also previously collaborated on 15 websites across the Government of Yukon digital ecosystem, including Elections Yukon, Yukon Assembly, and Yukon Courts. We support the improvement of the digital services available to Yukon citizens, ensuring high standards of accessibility, security, and consistency.

In parallel, our team has conducted other mandates including a revamp of the Sights and Sites App that helps visitors plan their road trip to the Yukon, creation of a Drupal 10 foundation for the new version of Yukon.ca, and various upgrade and migration projects. 

We also redesigned the Mapping the Way website to better reflect and celebrate the First Nations’ histories, stories and culture, as well as their ties to the land. It contextualizes indigenous Self-Government Agreements and reflects Mapping the Way’s mission to increase awareness of Yukon First Nations Final and Self-Government Agreements and showcase how these agreements benefit all Yukoners.

The Yukon Territory is slightly larger than California and has a population of over 45,000 people, distributed in communities across Canada’s northwest. It’s a popular tourist destination, known for its outdoor activities and wildlife, and its capital and largest city is Whitehorse.

Our goal is to help the Government of Yukon provide digital services more efficiently for residents, as well as visitors and businesses. This means delivering content and interactive features in a predictable and consistent way, building transparency. As eServices works towards digital transformation that continuously brings more information and public services online, our goal is to create CMS tools, development workflows, and features that are more standardized and extensible.

In addition, through the implementation of a comprehensive content strategy, our goal is to enable the Government of Yukon to adopt a more strategic, user-centred, and sustainable approach to managing content on Yukon.ca.

Because of their limited resources to oversee digital projects internally, the Government of Yukon leverages our Drupal expertise, technical leadership, and strategic capacity to support their digital presence. We’ve partnered on a number of mandates, including the continuous improvement and support of Yukon.ca. Our collaboration has included consulting mandates to plan for the migration and upgrade of websites to the latest version of Drupal. 

At the outset of our collaboration, we conducted an initial technical workshop, reviewed the existing workflows, analyzed each site’s functionality, and assessed plans for future platform developments. For new sites that we bring under the umbrella of support, we perform a technical audit to uncover any security vulnerabilities, performance issues, or legacy code, and provide recommendations to improve code quality, stability, and maintainability.

As part of our work on the digital content strategy for Yukon.ca, we compiled existing work, addressed gaps, and defined clear processes for content creation, governance, and maintenance, while ensuring alignment with government communications priorities, accessibility standards, and open government principles. We also developed a practical approach to identifying and managing ROTten (redundant, outdated, or trivial information) content through targeted reviews of web content, and reviewed and updated key performance indicators (KPIs) to better reflect user behavior and service owner needs.

Our work included: 

• Providing a more flexible, Apache Solr-based search interface that allows users to filter content more easily
• Implementation of content workflows to improve the experience for content editors
• Leading digital content strategy work for Yukon.ca, improving governance, content quality, and lifecycle management through clear processes, content reviews, and updated KPIs
• Improvements to language handling to ensure the website is fully bilingual
• Improvements to content, including SEO and accessibility compliance
• Maintenance and support, including security updates for 16 websites
• Technical documentation of Yukon.ca
• Setup of automated, local, multi-site environments to facilitate efficient deployments
• Bringing websites inline with Drupal and Government of Yukon standards
• Continuous front- and back-end improvements
• Drupal upgrades and content migration planning
• Process improvements for executing and managing the Government of Yukon’s largest web deployments

The result is an improved level of service for Yukon residents when it comes to accessing information and services online, as well as a more standardized and stable approach. We’ve lowered the cost of ownership by reducing dependencies on non-essential code and increased compliance with accessibility and security standards. 

For the eServices team, the improved content strategy streamlined content planning and maintenance through clear governance and defined roles. By reducing rework and friction, the team can now execute faster, more consistent updates over time.