Case Study: Office of the State Controller
The Challenge
Struggling to Meet Their Audience's Needs
The N.C. Office of the State Controller came to NCDIT to refresh their website. The old website was based on outdated technology and required multiple, cumbersome steps to be updated. Some of the problems included:
- Not mobile friendly
- Bloated with a decade's worth of content
- Out of date, with multiple copies of the same resources
- Unintuitive site structure
- Old platform not conducive to fixing any of these issues
Aging technology led to aging content, hurting customer service.
The Solution
NCDIT Digital Services offered OSC the Digital Commons platform.
Some features attractive to OSC include:
The clean, modern template offers OSC up-to-date functionality. The design is mobile friendly, and communications staff do not need coding expertise to update it.
The dynamic calendar allows OSC to publicize training events.
The alerts helps OSC communicate breaking information to state employees.
The extensive icon library allows site visitors to quickly navigate among categories of content.
The Result
Traffic to the OSC website is up 16 percent. Nineteen percent of that traffic is on mobile devices.
A Happy Customer
"As a person who has worked in web development since the early 1990s, I was initially skeptical about the help and oversight that NCDIT could and would provide. I was pleasantly pleased. The Digital Services staff went to great lengths to understand and help us understand our true customers, then, with that focus in mind, served us further by guiding us through the nuances of the Digital Commons platform. Their level of expertise on the platform was extremely helpful as we began to create some of the dynamic pieces of our site. We had some unique needs, and they were able to accommodate all of them. Overall, our experience with the Digital Commons Team was exceptional, and I would recommend them to anyone wishing to use this platform."
Michael Euliss, OSC Communications Director
An Aggressive Timeline
August 2016
OSC requested a site. A project plan was created and agreed upon between NCDIT Digital Services and OSC.
September 2016
Digital Services conducted a workshop for OSC to come to an agreement on the site audiences and their top tasks. An information architecture was solidified and determined the site menu and taxonomy.
October 2016
Digital Services created an empty website for OSC and trained OSC staff on how to build out the web content.
October to December 2016
Three OSC staff worked for three months to build the over 2,000 page website. Digital Services provided guidance and helped on some of the dynamic pieces. Outdated content that did not need migration was identified and kept off the new platform.
December 2016
The new OSC website is online.