12 July 2022
Earlier this year we published a blog about the plans for upgrading our main website at plymouth.gov.uk.
At that point, the Council Tax pages were live on the new site and we talked about moving the information across gradually. As ever with digital projects, things change, and we made the decision a few months ago to move the rest of the site in one go. We're hoping that by choosing to move the site in this way, any disruption will be minimal and people will still be able to find what they are looking for.
It doesn't mean we have been doing nothing, a lot of work has been going on behind the scenes to make the upgrade as seamless as possible. This has involved moving everything onto a test site and then checking for any problems. Some of these we could fix on the current site, such as pages with multiple parents as the new site doesn't support these. Others included duplicate URLs where pages had the same title which caused a number to be added to the website address. We've also been checking the content for accessibility issues.
We are now confident enough to move all our content into what we're calling live but hidden. This week all the content has been moved to the new live site, but it is hidden while we carry out more technical checks. As part of this work we are checking the most visited 500 pages which account for around 75% of website page views. We're also looking out for any accessibility issues, such as making sure we are using headings properly and all our images have alt-text. Once we're happy we'll make the new site live and all content will be redirected to our new site at new.plymouth.gov.uk. We expect this to be in the middle of August.
The move in numbers
It's not easy moving a large website. Just to give some indication of the work involved, there are:
- 41 migration scripts
- over 71,000 items to be moved - pages, images, documents etc
- A database with nearly 600,000 rows
What's next?
The new site will look different, but the structure and content will be the same. Next we'll be looking at redesigning the content and information architecture to make the site easy to navigate and accessible, and our information clear and easy to understand. We're putting together a multidisciplinary team who will work with users and services to make sure we are getting this right.