Steppin’ it up at SAMHSA
The SeKON SAMHSA (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services) team has endeavored this quarter to complete a lift and shift of theming from an Omega base to a USWDS (United States Web Design System) base. This significantly cleaned up the back-end of the Drupal site, with the removal of many custom modules, blocks, and legacy code, which in turn enabled the team to simultaneous update the site from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9. Both efforts of development are complete and are in QA to be deployed by mid-July, after they have been integrated with each other. All these changes to the back-end have been in preparation of a complete site refresh.
The redesign began at the end of May, and includes more USWDS components, taxonomical changes, new styling, and content administration updates. To add a new perspective and to aid SeKON in redesigning the entire site, SeKON subcontracted out to District Design Group and added new ICF UX/UI resources. The new UX/UI Design team is developing a roadmap, initiating the discovery phase, beginning to define personas and journey maps, and analyzing samhsa.gov heat-maps and Google Analytics. We’re very excited for all the changes that are to come with the redesign and look forward to building a new and improved SAMHSA.gov!
