Effective communication with TYPO3

"Online when possible and in person when necessary "

Subsites, Content Management, Solr

Accessibility, Digital channel, Target groups

Move with digitization

The website of the city of Utrecht consists of a toptasks site and several subsites. Nevertheless, the main objective is to provide online service. Utrecht wants to move with the digitization taking place around them. The municipality has three service channels: online, telephone and desk. Utrecht prefers to deal with things online, reducing desk work and the number of telephone calls. This is an advantage for both citizens and businesses, as well as the municipality itself. However, this should not be at the expense of service.

The website’s strategy

To achieve its target, a good website is a necessity. The former CMS was outdated. After a selection procedure the city of Utrecht choose TYPO3. Mainlly because they wanted to use an open source system. This ensures the municipality does not depend on the cooperation with one supplier. Of all the open source systems reviewed, the municipality considered TYPO3 to meet their requirements best.

An internal study has shown that an open source system certainly is not inferior to a closed source system.

Advantages

The new CMS brought a number of major advantages compared to the old situation. The new website is responsive and Digitally Accessible. Guidelines for Digital Accessibility built into the TYPO3 environment enforce compliance on the editors, compelling them to work uniformly. Central content management, which has been simplified considerably, caused an improvement on efficiency. TYPO3 facilitates the reuse of content that is stored on a central location within the CMS. This saves the editors a lot of time, e.g. when keeping all address blocks on the pages up-to-date. That's a real advantage.