GOVTalks Spring 2019

We held our 12th GOVTalks conference on May 22, 2019. Members of the Digital Services Georgia team joined with their development partner Lullabot to help state agency employees rethink how content connects with constituents, the latest on the migration to Drupal 8 and techniques to best present your public-facing content.

Read the recap of the event or watch the recap video below. All videos will be posted soon!

Keynote: The New Role of Your Website

Nikhil Deshpande
Chief Digital Officer, State of Georgia

Websites are no longer digital versions of brochures or a collection of pages. As state agencies get ready to migrate to the new digital platform, we demonstrate a decoupled approach to content management. Nikhil shined a light on how your content needs to be structured, inter-connected, and also decoupled from pages, to make your website dynamic and future-ready for channels that do not exist today.

Planning Beyond the Page

Jeff Eaton
Senior Digital Strategist, Lullabot

Communicating your organization’s messages effectively can be an overwhelming challenge in the age of mobile browsing, social sharing, and endlessly multiplying “engagement” tools. By moving beyond the “one post, one page” view of your content, you can make better use of your organization’s resources, simplify your own work, and plan more effectively for the future.

Migration Schedule Update

Donna Sumner
Sr. Project Manager, DSGa

The migration is underway! Donna provided a look at what a project of this scale includes, discussed the schedule and the process to get all sites onboarded. She also walked through some next steps and content scenarios to be on the lookout for agencies prep their websites for migration.

Best Way To Use New Content Types in D8

Dominic Distretti
Sr. User Experience Designer, DSGa

Dominic spoke about how your website pages should feed into each other, a brief explanation of how site visitors tend to browse through content and how to setup a customer feedback loop for continuous improvement.

Designing Smart Layouts in GovHub

Rachel Hart
UX / UI Designer, DSGa

In the new system, editors have a lot more freedom to lay out content in a way that makes sense for their agency’s goals and their audience’s needs. Of course, that means they’ll also have more freedom to lay it out in a way that doesn’t make sense. In this hands-on workshop, Rachel covered some ground rules and work on a page layout together so participants left knowing how to make their content shine.

Preparing Content for the Drupal 8 Migration

Amanda de Zayas
Content Strategist, DSGa

As agencies begin the migration from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8, it's time for a new approach to content. Amanda discussed how to prepare for content for migration and how to think differently in the way we organize, structure, and present public-facing content.