The Australian Government Solicitor (AGS) is the Australian Government's central legal service. They are a group within the Attorney-General's Department and are dedicated to the public interest.

AGS engaged Bliss Digital in early 2020 to assist with the redesign and Drupal development of their new GovCMS SaaS website. AGS was seeking a collaborative and iterative approach from our team, to produce a user experience and web design that is user-friendly, credible and visually engaging. A quality website communicating the firm’s values and professional services was important to compete with the online presence of other firms. However, AGS also differs from private sector law firms in that it is a part of the Commonwealth, its staff are public servants and it is accountable to the Attorney-General to the Parliament and the Australian community. We made sure that our design solution acknowledged and reflected that.

Ensuring the content of the new website is clear and user-friendly was key to this project. The previous site contained hundreds of pages and it was often difficult for users to find what they needed. During the project discovery phase, we conducted detailed analysis on the site’s architecture and mapped out a new IA using our Human-centred design methodology. To understand the needs of users, we conducted workshops for internal stakeholders and we performed user testing of our design solution on actual users.

The website was developed on the GovCMS SaaS platform. Our Drupal team, led by Certified Drupal Grandmasters, were able to develop some custom functionality on GovCMS SaaS to meet AGS’s requirements and make content easier to find for users. This included developing a Site Search, Searchable Events Calendar, People Search, Taxonomies and Categorised Publications Area. In addition, our developers were able to develop custom scripts to automatically migrate over thousands of pages of content, documents and assets from their previous site to GovCMS SaaS. We also provided training so that content updates can be easily and efficiently made by AGS staff moving forward.

In all, we were able to deliver the project successfully based on the project plan. Stakeholders at AGS are very satisfied with the new look and feel, content architecture and navigation of the new website. The new website now truly represents the level of professionalism of the organisation

AGS