LocalGov Microsites
The LocalGov Microsite distribution gives councils unprecedented control of their digital presence. From a single instance they can create multiple unique websites, easily updated and maintained.
The problem
Local councils often need to support many websites for their teams across departments and services. Despite sharing much functionality, each site is created from scratch. As many of the sites are outside the main team's oversight, it's easy for them to become outdated and stale. Council’s spend considerable money, time and energy ensuring these sites are secure, up-to-date, accessible and valuable.
The solution
The Microsite distribution is a stand-alone microsite system, allowing the administrator to create, maintain and destroy multiple distinct websites with ease. While it was built for and with councils in mind, we know this has much broader appeal.
It allows a single instrance to run many individual sites, each with their own content team, content, files, and domain. A new site can be configured in moments.
A microsite admin can customise the site's appearance through the UI and a site editor can create content rich pages, blogs, news articles, events and directories.
And when the site has run its course, the microsite controller can take it offline with a click of a button.
Check out the demo sites
Our involvement
Agile Collective led the research, design, development and user testing of the microsite distribution over the course of 2022. We worked alongside representatives from councils who told us what they needed and helped guide us towards creating the most valuable product for them.
Just some of its outstanding features
Centralised control
The microsites have a single codebase and database, meaning only one site to host and maintain.
A microsite controller has oversight of all of the active sites, and can set up a new one within moments. No longer do you need to keep track of all the sites you manage. What’s more, a microsite controller can see all the people who have access across all the sites, for more find grained control and security.
Separation of content and content team
Each individual is given access on a per-microsite basis, meaning you can have wholly different teams editing each site if that’s what’s needed. However, where a individual does manage multiple microsites their access details are the same.
Content is unique to each microsite - this includes pages, media, taxonomy terms and menus. Further, a microsite admin can decide which types of content to enable on each microsite - one site could be a dedicated blog site, another with all the feature set.
Content editor experience
We’ve built up a strong set of features for content editors to create stand out content. Most of the types of content allow you to add multiple sections of one, two or three column layouts. These can have different widths and background colours, allowing you to create interesting page layouts.
The interface for editing these sections has some great features too - you can drag and drop content between sections, duplicate content items or whole sections.
We have a great suite of content items - videos, images, tables, accordions, promo blocks and embedded content. These can easily be extended to allow for more options.
Site design
Each site can be configured - through the user interface - to use a bespoke set of colours and typography. A microsite admin can set up the content they want to appear in the header and footer and the site’s colours and typography.
The system is also set up to allow for a bespoke theme to be set on a site by site basis, so if there are some additional tweaks needed, this is easy to do.
Our offer
Whether you’d like assistance just getting started or bespoke development, Agile Collective is in a unique position to help you with microsites. We can host and maintain your microsites, and we can develop bespoke extensions and themes. Please get in touch to find out more.