Case study: Redesigning the ACSC’s cyber.gov.au website in Drupal 8
In June 2020, the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) launched its new website, cyber.gov.au.
The redesigned website provides simple and accessible cyber security advice and guidance. This helps businesses, government agencies, critical infrastructure operators and home users improve their cyber resilience. It also helps them better protect themselves online.
ACSC wanted to tackle perceptions that cyber measures are too difficult. To assist with this, the website makes relevant, timely and simple advice available to all Australians, no matter their level of IT understanding.
The website includes the Report Cyber digital portal where victims of cybercrime nationally can report a cyber security incident through the portal.
The improved ACSC website makes navigation easy by:
- separating information across four highlighted target audience types
- splitting large documents to make advice and guidance more easily understood
- simplifying information on landing pages, before providing specific topics
- tagging content to improve search functionality.
The website build
To ensure their Drupal 7 website remained accessible during the build, ACSC’s project team built the new Drupal 8 website in parallel.
Project Manager Helen described the process as an opportunity to rethink their website strategy. ‘User testing in the initial phase of the project helped us design user journeys. This ensured visitors were able to find the information they needed, and quickly.’
The ACSC added a connection on the website to their new secure portal. This is built in a Customer Relationship Manager (CRM). The CRM picks up theming from the website, making it an almost seamless transition for visitors. The portal allows government and partner organisations to collaborate in a secure space.
Helen says the ‘go live process’ was relatively straightforward. ‘The whole procedure took around seven hours. Most of that time was a lot of ‘under the hood’ preparation. The actual publishing of content only took about 15 minutes.’
GovCMS
The GovCMS platform provides a secure, stable environment. It has an easy interface for business users across the ACSC to edit content efficiently.
‘The GovCMS platform has clear templates for building a website that are simple to follow. Development is straight forward. There are flexible options to shape the look and feel of web pages,’ said Helen.
Since launching, the cyber.gov.au website has seen increased traffic. It has also received encouraging feedback from users and ACSC partners and stakeholders.