New Department of Treasury and Finance website

The players

Salsa Digital worked with the Department of Premier and Cabinet (DPC) and the content team from DTF to create a new website. The DTF site is one of two pilot sites that form part of DPC’s larger Single Digital Presence (SDP) project.

Background: Single Digital Presence (SDP) is the Victorian Government’s new whole-of-government digital platform to make it easier for citizens to find, understand and use Victorian Government information. SDP consists of three products — Bay (an open-source platform based on Lagoon), Tide (a headless Drupal CMS distribution) and Ripple coupled with Nuxt (the frontend presentation layer). Read more about SDP.

The problem

DPC needed pilot sites that could be built as part of the SDP project, while also creating reusable elements for the new SDP platform. The DTF website became the second pilot site for the SDP. (The first pilot site was the Governor of Victoria website — see case study.)

The solution

The DTF site was a little different to the Governor of Victoria pilot site — instead of Salsa driving the build and technology, this time DPC wanted to drive it internally to incorporate in-house learnings into the broader SDP project going forward.

The site’s foundation was based on many of the components Salsa and DPC had created for the Governor of Victoria website, and then DPC built onto that, creating its own components and Drupal themes to meet the specific DTF requirements. DTF led the design process to create a new look and feel for the site.

Salsa provided frontend and backend resources to supplement DPC’s internal team.

The benefits

The DTF website was a great opportunity for DPC to drive a website project within the new framework of the SDP, while also delivering benefits to the DTF, including:

• A new, improved site

• An easy-to-use content management system (CMS)

• An up-to-date CMS, which minimises security risks

• A responsive site, that can be viewed on desktops, tablets or smartphones

• A better citizen-experience through improved content, visual design and user interface

• An accessible site

• Reduced operational costs because the site is built on the new Bay platform

Benefits to DPC included key learnings from driving the pilot site build themselves, which they can use in the future as more sites come on board the SDP platform.

Why Salsa Digital?

DTF website was one of two pilot sites that formed part of the larger SDP project. Salsa won the SDP tender in 2017 on the strength of our response, which not only demonstrated our ability to build a distribution to meet their requirements but also showed innovative thinking around the open platform (which then became Bay).

About Salsa Digital

We’re a highly specialised, enterprise-grade digital agency focused on open source for social good and innovation. We’re committed to the open everything movement (OpenX) and to the many benefits this ethos provides including transparency, innovation, and sharing and improving problems and patterns solved by the pioneers before us.

The open source movement has played a key role in the evolution of Salsa. Over the years, as technology and practices have developed, this commitment to open source has grown to encompass a much broader base beyond open source content management systems (open CMS) — open data, open platform and open design. We contribute and deliver services in all these areas, with a strong involvement in specific open source initiatives such as Drupal, Wordpress, GovCMS, Single Digital Presence, Kubernetes/Lagoon and CKAN.

Read more about SDP

SDP is a total digital solution, a digital landscape the Victorian Government can use to create a unified online presence. Below are more related Salsa publications covering everything from the value proposition to technical case studies:

• Creating a single digital presence for our citizens— an overview of the process, from tender to launch.
• SDP - delivering value— key insights into the value proposition for citizens, the Victorian Government and content authors
• Dissecting the SDP— a deep technical analysis of the three products within the SDP - Bay, Tide and Ripple
• Case study: Bay, the open platform — Find out about Victoria’s new open source platform
• Case study: Tide, the content distribution— Find out about Victoria’s new open source CMS
• Case study: Ripple, the presentation layer — Find out about Victoria’s new presentation layer and Atomic Library of reusable design elements
• Case study: Governor of Victoria website — SDP pilot site

Read Our Media Release