City of Austin

Replatforming a Fragmented Department Landscape Onto One Governed System

Challenge

The City of Austin set out to build a digital experience as vibrant and welcoming as the city itself, putting residents first and making it easier to find information, access services and get things done. Together with Material, their mandate was clear: create a modern, unified platform that brings Austin’s identity to life online and serves residents, visitors, businesses and a complex, multi-department ecosystem.

As Austin’s digital presence grew, so did the complexity behind it. Navigation made it challenging for residents to intuitively uncover the right information. It was harder for City employees to meet the online needs of constituents with disabilities in a way that reflected Austin’s commitment to inclusivity. Content governance was uneven across departments, making it hard to maintain quality or brand coherence at scale. Overlapping content types and complex user dynamics made publishing and organization increasingly difficult to manage.

The City of Austin and Material saw an opportunity not just to redesign and replatform a website, but to streamline these complexities and build a more sustainable, maintainable and scalable digital experience for everyone it serves.

WHAT WE DID

Digital Experience

Content Management Systems

Drupal Development

Acquia

Approach

Material partnered with the City on an extensive discovery phase, conducting interviews with city employees, citizen research and data reviews to understand where the experience was breaking down and why. Those insights shaped every decision that followed — from consolidating a sprawling legacy of fragmented content types into a standardized, governable model, to migrating the technical platform to a more modern approach using Drupal with Acquia.

Design, strategy and development teams then worked closely with the City to establish a clear content strategy, scalable design language system and a practical plan for a website built around user needs.

Search-first homepage: Prominent, dynamic search with popular queries, suggestions and history, giving users a direct path to what they need.

User-friendly navigation: Global navigation redesigned so residents can intuitively find what they need, with services prioritized and easier to discover.

Design language system: A single source of truth built on atomic design principles, ensuring consistency across components, modules and page templates as the site scales.

Microsite templates: Flexible, branded templates that allow departments to express their identity within a shared system.

Outcomes

Together, we built a modern, unified digital experience that feels unmistakably Austin: vibrant, human and welcoming. Consolidating multiple vendors and tools into a single Acquia ecosystem freed city teams from reactive, siloed maintenance and established a governed, centralized way of working.

Accessibility went from a manual, inconsistently applied effort to something built into the platform by design, with components and templates aligned to WCAG standards. Support for 14 regional languages ensured the platform served Austin’s full, linguistically diverse community.

75%

Reduction in complexity, by consolidating 50+ content types to 12

70%

Faster publishing workflows, from multi-day admin cycles to hours

80%

Simplification in user role management, from 30+ roles to 6 governed roles

Regional languages supported across the platform

The redesigned website makes it easier for residents, visitors and city employees to find information, complete tasks and access services. What was once fragmented across departments now operates as a single, unified system.

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CONTACT