Town of Okotoks

Website Redesign with Migration from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8

The Town of Okotoks is located in Alberta just south of Calgary, and is always looking for ways to provide as much value as possible to its residents, local businesses and visitors. The Town’s website was a reliable resource that required some updates to make it eye-catching, easy to navigate and UX-focused. We are fortunate to have worked with the Town of Okotoks on multiple projects since 2017, which provided us with a deep understanding to the Town and allowed us to customize a site that displayed everything the Town of Okotoks has to offer.

Visit Town of Okotoks

Services Provided

  • Accessible Design
  • Custom Solutions
  • User-focused Design
  • Website Improvements
  • Project Management

The Challenge

The Town of Okotoks was looking to build on the current site’s success by adding customized solutions to a refreshed design and a revised, streamlined and user-centric site architecture to reach the needs of its community and provide a superior user experience. Additionally, their site was using Drupal 7 and the Town was looking to upgrade to a Drupal 8 solution. The Town of Okotoks provides its users with a large amount of information and content which would all have to be migrated over to Drupal 8, along with any compatible integrations. This project also had a large focus on user-experience, the Town wanted a site that was web accessible and very easy to navigate.

Okotoks website- Desktop
Okotoks website- Mobile

The Solution

Leveraging our in-depth knowledge of Drupal, we re-created the municipal site in Drupal 8 and migrated all the functions from the previous site. Our team members have extensive knowledge in content management strategies and a variety of content governance models. We leveraged this knowledge to combat the challenge of migrating such a large amount of content we conducted a thorough content audit and were able to reduce the site from approximately 600 to 400 pages. We also created a new sitemap that was intuitive and easy to navigate to enhance the user’s experience. The Town of Okotoks website was already an established and trusted community tool, so to ensure we met the needs of the community, we decided to do a public beta release phase to gather feedback from the public.

Screenshot of the Town of Okotoks website homepage news and events section.
Town of Okotoks website calendar screenshot.

The Results

The Town of Okotoks' municipal site was successfully launched in October 2020. It is a modern, easy-to-use website for the Town of Okotoks' citizens, businesses and staff alike. Drupal 8’s extensive functionality combined with the staff training we provided resulted in streamlined processes and internal efficiencies. We were thrilled to continue our partnership with the Town of Okotoks by providing ongoing support services and having the opportunity to redesign and develop their tourism site okotokstourism.ca.

"Upanup is a professional and exemplary company who I would highly recommend for any website work, from original concept and design, to launch and maintenance. Working with their team is easy, and they are timely, efficient and extremely knowledgeable. They are so accommodating and are very creative in their solutions. With Upanup, we have peace-of-mind and complete confidence in their abilities. If you want a worry-free website that is state-of-the-art, then I would strongly recommend you work with their team."

Melanie Heemeryck

Communications and Website Specialist, Town of Okotoks

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