Background
“… The subject of this Case Study is a project central to supporting this strategy through improvements to VA’s primary Veteran-facing property, VA.gov, through the implementation of an open-source content management system (CMS). An innovative project with the potential to drastically improve the digital experience of Veterans required an equally modern and innovative method to evaluate and contract for those services. The approach detailed below was the result, jointly developed by VA’s Technology Acquisition Center (TAC) and the Digital Service at VA (DSVA).”
The Problem
“The Web Brand Consolidation Working Group (a subcommittee of VA’s Web Governance Board) was created to take action on the modernization of VA’s primary Veteran-facing web properties: va.gov, vets.gov, myhealth.va.gov, ebenefits.va.gov, and explore.va.gov. The group identified four key problems with the current Veteran experience across these web properties:
- Veterans cannot find the tools and services they need online
- Users are confused by the disjointed navigation between sites
- VA web sites are designed for the Administrations, not users
- Cross-administration governance of VA.gov is complicated”
“To address these problems, the Working Group decided to design and build a new Veteran-first experience for VA.gov. This experience will include a new homepage for VA.gov; updated global header, footer, and navigation; new benefit hub pages; and new landing pages for many of the top VA services. The new pages will be served from the Amazon Web Services (AWS) GovCloud (VA Enterprise Cloud) infrastructure currently supporting vets.gov. In addition to the new pages, the content and tools that currently exist on vets.gov will be rolled under the va.gov URL structure and the vets.gov brand will be retired. This work was started under an existing contract and was launched on Veteran’s Day 2018. The effort discussed in this Case Study initiated the implementation of a CMS within the updated VA.gov webpage and will support that implementation over the next eighteen months.” Read the full article here.
Source: VA.gov Modernization Comparative Analysis Case Study – VA TAC.
