Drupal 9 Platform Upgrades - Cook County Government

Clarity recently completed and launched a necessary re-platform of the Cook County Government website, upgrading it to Drupal 9. In addition to the necessary platform upgrade, additional pain points to address were: need for refreshed look and feel, improved navigation and accessibility, updated workflow processes, improving both internal and external UX, consolidating and standardizing core infrastructure, and the need for site editors to have more control over design and content presentation.
Clarity partnered with Acquia to facilitate a migration to their cloud hosting services, enabling the use of an infrastructure and content toolset that modernizes the County’s web services landscape.
Upgrading from Drupal 7 to Drupal 9 required a full rebuild of the website. This gave Clarity an opportunity to address the County’s aforementioned pain points as part of our version upgrade. Clarity’s team of experts worked closely with the County to identify priorities prior to development. The goal was a punch list of items that would receive special attention as we built in Drupal 9.
Cook County is the second largest in the United States, providing resources and information to a wide audience as well as its own employee base of roughly 28,000. This site receives just under 10 million page views per year and with a new, consistent underlying code base, this positions the County to instantiate other sites on this platform relatively quickly going forward.