About the Client
The Food Standards Agency (FSA) is the UK’s central government department for food safety and hygiene in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Their work touches every person in the UK and includes research, policy making, legislation, industry guidance and regulation.
The FSA's main site, food.gov.uk, hosts one of the UK's largest food industry knowledge bases and is also the government's main portal for food safety news and campaigns, with upwards of 1 million site visitors per month.
Client Goals
The site had been ongoingly extended over a long period without any clear development strategy leaving it highly inconsistent, very poorly documented and extremely difficult to maintain. To complicate matters, the site was built using a legacy CMS that was over 10 years old and therefore no longer supported and the original site developers could not be reached to gain any insight into its construction.
Code Positive were engaged to completely rebuild the high traffic food.gov.uk site, add new features and migrate 10,000+ pages of content from its old proprietary CMS to Drupal.
What We Did
Site Audit and Large Scale Drupal Migration
Re-platforming and migrating this enterprise-scale site required an in-depth understanding of it's features, content and information architecture. As this knowledge was missing at the start of the project, Code Positive's first step was to perform an in-depth site audit, examining its technical and functional implementation and mapping its content and structure.
Based on the audit results, Code Positive leveraged its experience in Drupal development and project leadership to create a coherent plan for re-platforming the site without taking it offline or disrupting site visitor experience. Alongside this, we also worked with the FSA to understand their new feature requirements and create a strategy for their delivery.
Code Positive's expert development team rebuilt the site's existing features piece by piece in Drupal, while our QA team oversaw a rolling program of test content migration to road test the new site's functionality. Once the site's core functionality had been successively replicated we began work on the FSA’s new feature requests and initiated the migration of content in stages.
Results
Food.gov.uk was seamlessly switched over to Drupal with all key features and content in place, without any down time or disruption to site visitors.
The project was delivered both on time and on budget time and enabled the FSA’s internal web team to retake control of the site and its further development.