My journey of re-platforming the official website of the Government of Balochistan
The official website of the Government of Balochistan is the digital destination for the government of Pakistan’s largest province. The website not only provides a source of government news and updates, it lets government officials and employees access latest documentation, tender notices, budgets, legislation and other legalese.
The Challenge
But the GOB website was developed on a dated content management system and without mobile users in mind. The bespoke PHP content management system was almost nine years old and showing its age. It posed challenges for editorial teams, was difficult for developer teams to update, and it was felt in the digital age the website was falling short of its expectations.
For editorial teams, simple processes like managing images and writing articles were unnecessarily complicated.
Something as simple as updating a document, adding a new minister, or updating brand elements across the site was complex and time-consuming, requiring developer knowledge and duplicated effort across various parts of the site.
The solution
The GOB urgently needed a new digital platform with a design that met the following criteria:
- Easy to maintain, providing an enhanced workflow for site administrators
- Easy to update and scale alongside the business
- Offer a seamless content management experience for the editorial team
- A user-friendly interface to navigate across the site easily
- Open source and flexible
- Competitively priced
How we did it?
The government partnered with my company BohraDevelopers and embarked on a journey of the complete revamp of the website from a new design to a new platform.
We kickstarted the project by working on the design. I worked closely with the designer making sure that the most prioritized content was easily accessible on the homepage. I suggested that the government’s most top three areas: Job openings, Tender Notifications and Acts & Rules will be on the main navigation menu.
The next step was perhaps the most challenging part, the content audit. The content available on the current website was audited from start to finish. I created a Google Spreadsheet document and assigned one of my colleagues to identify the number of images, documents and content published on the site and arrange them into categories based on the dates of being published. After five months, I was able to obtain a holistic picture of the content available, spreading across 112 pages, 781 documents and 2466 images dating from 2011 to 2019.
After the design was agreed and content audit complete, it was time for the development. My job was to convert the design into a fully functional website. I developed the theme and used WordPress’s famous post type and content field components to structure the content. I made sure it will be easy for the editorial team to create new or update and existing pages easily with little effort. I created four custom post types, Budgets, Departments, Tenders and PSDP and assigned each a custom taxonomy. My knowledge of WordPress’s content reference was a real deal and we managed to develop the site using less than thirty plugins.
the result
The Government of Balochistan now has a flexible, maintainable and good-looking site that can grow in line with the users’ needs and address its growth plans.
Changes that would previously have taken days to implement can now be made in a matter of hours and the focus on flexible, reusable components means that both administrator and development workflows have been hugely streamlined.