The Client
The City of Austin is the capital of Texas and one of the fastest-growing cities in the United States, serving a diverse population of over one million residents. As a major municipal government, the City delivers a wide range of public services to residents, businesses, visitors, and city staff through a portfolio of digital platforms spanning multiple domains and departments.
The Situation
The City of Austin needed to modernize its digital presence by migrating from a fragmented legacy website to a centralized Drupal 11 and Acquia DXP platform. Its primary goals were to resolve critical gaps in resident experience, eliminate governance inefficiencies, and reduce high operational costs. The project involved redesigning and relaunching both global and microsites across four distinct domains, replacing a collection of isolated platforms with a cohesive digital ecosystem.
The Challenge
The City of Austin's existing digital infrastructure had grown fragmented and difficult to manage at scale. Across its legacy platforms, content had accumulated without consistent tagging or departmental classification, creating significant hurdles for the new information architecture the City needed to implement. The sheer volume of legacy content, including complex embedded media formats, made migration a substantial undertaking.
Beyond the technical complexity, the City faced significant governance and alignment challenges. Defining and meeting a comprehensive set of permissions, URL structures, and CMS requirements from departments across the city required extensive discovery and stakeholder engagement. Each department brought distinct needs and priorities, and consolidating those requirements into a unified platform without losing departmental flexibility demanded careful planning and formal risk management processes.
At the center of it all was a user-focused imperative: ensuring the new platform solved real-world problems for a diverse user base of residents, businesses, visitors, and city staff, including underserved communities requiring access to services in multiple languages.
The Solution
The City of Austin tapped Acquia partner Material to deliver the transformation. Material implemented a centralized platform architecture on Drupal 11 and Acquia Cloud Platform, replacing the fragmented approach of managing separate sites independently. This unified architecture allowed the City to standardize processes while maintaining flexibility for different departments and services, achieving economies of scale, improved governance, and reduced redundancy.
Austin's diverse population includes many residents who speak languages other than English as their primary language. To ensure equitable access to city services, the platform was built to support 14 regional languages from the outset, a foundational requirement rather than an afterthought.
The integrated technology stack addressed the City's specific operational and experience challenges:
- Acquia Site Studio gave Austin's distributed content teams an intuitive experience builder that allowed authors across dozens of departments to compose and manage digital experiences without requiring deep technical expertise, reducing dependency on centralized development resources.
- Acquia DAM solved the asset governance and discoverability problems plaguing the legacy estate, creating a centralized system with logical separation by asset groups that gave departments clear ownership and control over their assets.
- Acquia Search powered by SearchStax replaced the fragmented, duplicate content that had undermined search relevance on the legacy platform, delivering federated search functionality that enabled residents to find information seamlessly across multiple domains and content types.
- Acquia Conversion Optimization enabled data-driven decision-making through A/B testing and personalization capabilities, allowing the City to optimize user experiences based on actual behavioral data.
Governance and accessibility were embedded throughout the implementation. WCAG 2.2 AA compliance was built into components and templates by default rather than applied manually after the fact. Robust role-based permissions and component-level access controls ensured departments maintained appropriate oversight while enabling collaborative content creation across the organization.
The Results
The transformation delivered measurable improvements across publishing efficiency, content governance, user experience, and operational cost.
Publishing and content efficiency
- Publishing speed increased 60-70%, with workflows shifting from a multi-day, administrator-dependent review process to a streamlined author-to-publisher flow completed in hours
- Content complexity reduced by approximately 75%, consolidating more than 50 legacy content types into 12 standardized types
- User role architecture simplified by approximately 80%, reducing more than 30 unmanaged roles to 6 governed roles
- Department onboarding accelerated through a plug-and-play multisite architecture, improving scalability across city departments
Resident experience and accessibility
- Information discovery improved significantly, with a shift from department-driven silos to a unified information architecture and standardized templates, reducing the effort required for residents to find services
- Accessibility compliance moved from manual, uneven implementation to a WCAG-aligned standard built into components and templates by default
- City-wide visual consistency was established by replacing inconsistent departmental branding with an enforced design system
- Search relevance and accuracy are enhanced by replacing fragmented, duplicate content with a structured system utilizing Acquia Search powered by SearchStax
Financial and operational impact
- Overall operational costs were reduced by consolidating multiple vendors and tools into a single Acquia ecosystem
- Total cost of ownership decreased by shifting from reactive, manual maintenance to a governed, centralized model
- Operational risk is reduced through platform consolidation and the integration of Acquia DAM governance with SSO
The project established a future-ready foundation for subsequent phases, including personalization, analytics, and experimentation.