Norwich City Council site rebuild

The challenge: rebuild and rewrite

Norwich City Council was undertaking a major platform shift, moving from a proprietary CMS (Jadu) to Drupal for the first time. 

This meant not only rebuilding the website but also learning a fundamentally different way to manage content, infrastructure, and deployments. For a council team without prior Drupal or Linux hosting experience, the rebuild required confidence not just in the end product, but in their ability to support it long-term.

Norwich City Council needed to:

• Rewrite and restructure a large volume of service content for new page types
• Keep critical services live throughout the transition
• Learn a new platform
• Rebuild the site in LocalGov Drupal (moving from Jadu)
• Define and build Azure hosting options and infrastructure

Our approach: a phased launch, with an emphasis on skilling up the Norwich team

From the outset, Agile Collective worked with Norwich City Council to adopt a phased migration and launch strategy, guided by content readiness rather than technical considerations.

Key principles included:

• Launching services in groups over multiple phases
• Rewriting content, rather than migrating legacy material
• Giving the Norwich digital teams the skills they needed to improve content and use the new platform
• Keeping the live site stable throughout

Early phases included core services such as bins and recycling, with more complex areas — including council tax, parking, directories and news — introduced later as confidence grew.

Content training and governance

Agile provided content training upfront for Norwich City Council, covering:

• Best practice for writing user-centred service content
• How LocalGov Drupal page types work in practice
• When to use services, step-by-steps and guides
• How to strip back over-long legacy content
• Writing accessible content

Although content creation ultimately sat with a central council team (rather than being fully distributed), the training helped establish a shared baseline and informed decisions throughout the rewrite.

Crucially, no automated content migration was used. All service content was rewritten for the new site, ensuring it aligned with user needs and LocalGov Drupal patterns rather than replicating historical structures.

Managing phased migration with Entity Share

To enable phased delivery, Agile Collective implemented Entity Share, a set of Drupal modules that synchronise content across sites.

In this project, Entity Share enabled Norwich City Council to work on content in a separate, non-live “content build” site, while keeping the public-facing site clean and stable. Content for each phase was tagged, reviewed and signed off before being pulled into the live environment in controlled batches.

This approach meant:

• Editors could work safely without publishing unfinished content
• Services could be prepared weeks or months in advance
• Live content could continue to evolve independently
• Each phase could be launched with confidence and clear boundaries

What Entity Share enabled — and what it required

Entity Share made the phased approach possible, but it wasn’t a silver bullet.

From a technical perspective, Agile Collective spent time:

• Configuring reliable synchronisation rules
• Debugging edge cases where the content didn’t behave as expected
• Ensuring updates to live content weren’t overwritten during imports
• Supporting repeated verification as content moved between environments

From a process perspective, it required:

• Clear tagging and phase discipline
• Strong oversight from the Norwich City Council content team
• Careful management of internal links between live and non-live services
• Ongoing attention to redirects and search behaviour

Technical training, delivery and LocalGov Drupal features

Agile Collective delivered a full LocalGov Drupal build for Norwich City Council, enabling features as they were needed to avoid overwhelming teams early on. These included:

• Service pages, step-by-steps and guides
• News and publications
• Directories with proximity search
• Events (available, though not yet used)
• Subsites and homepage variations
• Workflows and editorial controls

Most functionality was built early and switched on gradually, allowing the council to grow into the platform rather than being confronted with everything at once.

Agile Collective also handled:

• Theming and front-end implementation based on council-supplied visual designs
• Multi-environment deployment and testing
• Redirect strategy between old and new sites during phased launches
• Support for search testing across mixed content states

Knowledge Transfer and Capacity Building

We delivered comprehensive training to Norwich City Council's IT and infrastructure teams to ensure they could confidently support and develop their LocalGov Drupal site independently after launch.

Multi-faceted training approach

Our training programme combined several delivery methods to accommodate different learning styles and operational needs:

• Onsite training sessions provided hands-on experience with the platform in a focused environment, allowing team members to ask questions and work through real scenarios together
• Weekly training calls offered ongoing support during the critical post-launch period, addressing emerging questions and reinforcing key concepts
• Technical support was available throughout the transition period, providing a safety net as the team built confidence
• Extensive documentation created a lasting reference resource that teams could consult long after formal training concluded.

Building sustainable capacity

This approach ensured Norwich City Council's teams gained not just theoretical knowledge, but practical skills they could apply immediately. By the end of the programme, the IT and infrastructure teams were equipped to maintain site performance, troubleshoot issues, and independently implement future enhancements.

Azure DevOps Infrastructure and Deployment

Norwich City Council had already standardised much of its wider infrastructure on Microsoft Azure, so hosting the new LocalGov Drupal site within Azure was a strategic requirement. 

Agile Collective worked closely with the council’s technical team to explore the viable hosting patterns for Drupal on Azure, assess trade-offs, and design an architecture that aligned with internal policies, security expectations and operational realities.

Because the council team had no prior experience hosting Drupal, and limited Linux experience, Agile supported the hosting work from first principles, working alongside council developers to design and build the Azure infrastructure from the ground up. We helped them to define dev environments, deployment processes and security controls as the project progressed.

This involved setting up robust CI/CD pipelines to automate build and deployment, ensuring reliable, repeatable releases across development, staging, and production environments. 

We worked closely with the council's IT team to establish best practices for version control, branch management, and deployment workflows that aligned with their internal processes and security requirements. 

This infrastructure setup gave the council a solid foundation for managing their site, enabling them to deploy updates and new features confidently, safely and efficiently.

The final setup went beyond Agile’s baseline recommendations with additional security layers implemented to meet Norwich City Council’s internal standards.

The outcome

Today, Norwich City Council not only has a fully functioning LocalGov Drupal website, but also an internal technical team that understands and owns the hosting platform it runs on. The Azure infrastructure is now largely managed in-house, with Agile providing occasional support for complex issues and targeted training around areas such as Drupal security updates. This handover reflects a core project goal: leaving the council better equipped, more confident, and less dependent on external suppliers over time.