Overview
Evolving Web redesigned and redeveloped the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) corporate website, which needed to be user-friendly, cost-effective, easy to update by staff, and comply with accessibility standards. To achieve this, tens of thousands of pages of content were migrated to the new Drupal site with a suite of enterprise-grade tools to ensure performance, accessibility, and stability. The result is a robust enterprise-level CMS that meets the OSC's requirements of affordability, scalability, extensibility, adaptability, and maturity.
About the Client
The Ontario Securities Commission is a regulatory agency that administers and enforces securities legislation and contributes to the health and performance of Ontario’s economy. As a public organization, they protect investors, deter misconduct, and regulate participants involved in capital markets.
Project Goals
Our primary goals were to bring the website inline with accessibility standards, while updating the underlying technology stack. This required making the design responsive, and using tools to analyze not just the accessibility of the platform but also the content.
We also wanted OSC to be able to maintain accessibility of the content in the long-term, and for branches to take ownership of their content. Certain branches wanted more efficient workflows and to provide more self-service information through the website. Overall, we wanted to lower the cost of ownership, largely by reducing the staff time required to make updates.
Challenges
The previous website didn’t have a strong digital brand and made it difficult to get a sense of the OSC’s mission and values. While the new site still needed to communicate a lot of detailed information, it needed more room to breathe and space for the OSC’s values and purpose to come through.
The legacy CMS had a large number of unstructured HTML pages and PDFs that were difficult to find. In order to solve these problems, we needed to create a consistent taxonomy so that all the content could be easily cross-referenced and indexed in search. The numerous web pages and documents (PDFs, Word and Excel) were not accessible, the migration to Drupal needed to address the accessibility issues as much as possible. Evolving Web was brought on to carry out the complete redesign and redevelopment of the site, which hadn’t undergone any major changes in over ten years.
Solution
The project began with a technical discovery phase to analyze the existing content and how this would be incorporated into the new website. We migrated a large amount of unstructured legacy content from to Drupal, while adding tags and structured fields. During the migration process, we added as much metadata automatically as possible to make sure the new website would be well-structured and searchable.
We conducted user experience workshops to assess the personas and user journeys that would make the new website more task-oriented. We wanted the new information architecture to address user needs and give users quick access to the most important content. We were able to improve the user experience to make it more user-focused rather than simply reflecting the OSC’s corporate structure. We balanced the needs of investors, participants in capital markets, and the public by creating specific sections of the website that would give them quick access to information. In collaboration with the OSC’s content experts, we created an intuitive interface that uses more plain language and less jargon.
Our work included:
- A consolidated, user-friendly search experience supported by the new information architecture, with the ability to search thousands of documents and smart filters and sorting to narrow results
- Embedded search in specific sections of the website so that users can easily find detailed information about decisions, rules, proceedings, investor warning, alerts, and other content
- Simple approval workflow so that departments can take ownership of creating content while the communications team takes responsibility for final review and publishing.
- Integration with single sign-on for content editors
- Content editing tools that optimize ease-of-use, including component-based page building tools
- WCAG Level AA compliance to comply with new AODA standards
- On-going accessibility monitoring with Siteimprove
- Fully bilingual website (English and French)
- Migration of static, unstructured content including 45,000 HTML pages and documents (PDF, Word, XLS)
- Improved content moderation workflow for drafting, scheduling, and publishing content
- Media library and archive to make it easy for content editors to upload, search, download and delete images, videos, and documents
- Content recommendations based on a combination of metadata and manual related content references
- Integration with Siteimprove’s SEO tools to audit content and recommend SEO improvements
- Hosting on Acquia Cloud, with security monitoring and a suite of enterprise-grade tools to ensure performance, accessibility, and stability
- Manual and automated process to detect security vulnerabilities as part of our development workflow
Results
The OSC’s website serves five main user groups: market participants, investors, the general public, members of the media, and the OSC’s 600 staff members. It’s content-rich and complex, comprising 65,000+ documents in English and 4,500+ in French. More than half of these documents relate to proposed and final policy and regulation.
On the new website, data is searchable and accurately tagged so that users can find what they need quickly. The website benefits from Drupal’s flexibility as a CMS and also as a secure framework designed with robust security in mind.