Umbraco local government web design
North Carolina League of Municipalities


Overview
The North Carolina League of Municipalities (NCLM) is a member-driven organization whose members consist of cities and towns of all sizes throughout North Carolina. While NCLM wanted to engage current users more and gain new ones, over the years of content changes, the navigation became cumbersome. NCLM partnered with Atlantic BT for their government web design project in order to completely overhaul the user experience.
Project Type
Custom Website
Technology
Umbraco
Industry
Government
Our Process
Company Overview
For more than 100 years, NCLM has been dedicated to representing the interests of cities and towns throughout the State. Their mission is to bolster local leadership by collaborating centrally to promote best practices and impart knowledge and expertise. NCLM has accomplished many efforts over the years including; spearheading clean water bond issues, as well as establishing self-funded pools for workers comp, employee benefits and property and liability insurance.


The Ask
NCLM leaders strived to increase awareness of the benefits of becoming a member to all municipalities. However, members complained that the organization of the web content was not intuitive, and the resource library search didn’t work well. So navigating the website for relevant resources was quite difficult. Behind the scenes, users needed a seamless way to log in to their account based in Microsoft Dynamics and access the information they need. Atlantic BT was entrusted with the government web design process to better suit their members’ needs while drawing awareness to the many benefits NCLM has to offer.
Our Government Web Design Process
Discovery
Atlantic BT starts every Discovery phase with stakeholder interviews, laying a solid groundwork based on business requirements. We ran a Technical audit on the website and determined that the redesign would be an Umbraco based .NET Core MVC application. We conducted user interviews and developed personas to understand the distinct needs of a varied user base including clerks, council members, board members, affiliate members, claims adjusters and new users. Armed with these insights, we strategically revamped the website’s navigation, optimizing it to more effectively meet and fulfill these varied requirements.
Development
The development phase of NCLM’s government web design project was organized and implemented in a way to support the client’s timeline and complete larger content areas first to accommodate content entry. We integrated Algolia Advanced Search through a sync function that connects with the Algolia API. This ensures a smooth and efficient navigation and search experience, allowing users to effortlessly locate contacts, documents, bills, and resources across the website. Data is imported via a .NET Framework Azure function in order to get data from NCLM’s instance of Microsoft Dynamics and import it into the database used by the website.

Design
We started with a concept board incorporating NCLM’s brand. Recognizing that the primary challenge faced by users was locating information on the site, We designed a mega-menu for easier navigation. On the technical end, we created a technical architecture to handle the incorporation of data synced from a Microsoft Dynamics instance.
Deploy
Our developers and cloud engineers supported infrastructure development in Azure as part of our deploy phase.
Delight
As for our delight phase, we were able to add new features and facilitate NCLM’s ability to launch subsites even while content was being completed and the main site hadn’t yet launched.