After Yukon.ca launched in February 2018 we put a freeze on content migration for a couple of months so we had time to address bugs and initial user feedback. In the summer we tackled corporate pages on gov.yk.ca and rolling out Yukon.ca categories and features that were not part of the initial launch.
In the fall we began rolling out our transition plan and we haven’t looked back over the past months.
All government departments and corporations have developed their own content migration plans. The Executive Council Office created the overarching transition plan based on feedback from the transition team. The idea is to support departments in their work, provide guidance on standards, work to find solutions where needed and start to close out the old department websites.
The Executive Council Office dedicated 1 to 2 weeks to work with the department to follow their plan and move as many of their pages to Yukon.ca as possible.
The transition order
We ordered these meetings by working with the transition team. These factors helped us rank the departments.
- Resources on the project. This was whether or not the department had a dedicated staff person to oversee the work.
- Risk of continuing to publish on their existing content management system. For example, we met with the Department of Environment first because their old website was at risk of failing and was challenging to update.
- Readiness. This means the department had rewritten a big chunk of their pages and they were approved for publishing.
We met with departments and corporations in the following order:
- Corporate pages
- Environment
- Highways and Public Works
- Public Service Commission
- Community Services
- Economic Development
- Women’s Directorate
- Executive Council Office
- Yukon Housing Corporation
- Tourism and Culture
- Health and Social Services
- Energy, Mines and Resources
- French Language Services Directorate
- Yukon Liquor Corporation (pending)
- Finance
- Justice
- Education
- Yukon Development Corporation
Dedicated transition session process
Before we met with departments
Departments rewrote their pages for Yukon.ca and added them to GatherContent. We used GatherContent for workflow approvals and to manage our French translation.
Meeting with departments in their dedicated session.
Not all departments had content prepared for the session. If that was the case, ECO worked on content with the departments during the session.
ECO and the departments worked together to build and publish the department’s approved pages. As we did this:
- department transition managers learned the process for building and linking pages;
- we identified bugs and areas where we might need to develop new content types, sub-categories and more;
- we set up redirects and archive and delete webpages from the old website; and
- we helped the department plan out their next steps.
After we met with departments
Department transition managers continued to implement their migration plans: planning content, rewriting and finalizing their pages in GatherContent.
ECO reviews, approves and publishes all new content for Yukon.ca in GatherContent. Departments update their pages on Yukon.ca following the Digital Standard.
Almost all departments became publishers following their dedicated session.
What is the result of all this work?
We now have many new pages including:
- 527 basic pages
- 133 multi-step pages
- 243 places records (including campgrounds and recreation sites)
- 8 campaigns
- 14 department pages.
- 1,795 document download pages
- 2 new category pages (Statistics and data, Science and natural resources)
- 41 events
- 110 sub-category pages
What’s left?
Many of the larger departments are still migrating their content to Yukon.ca. They will carry on this work, but we are targeting October 2019 to have the majority of department web pages moved to Yukon.ca.
This includes:
- Community Services
- Energy, Mines and Resources
- Finance
- Health and Social Services
- Highways and Public Works
- Justice
We are very close at completing work with:
- Education
- Environment
- Executive Council Office
- French Language Services Directorate
- Tourism and Culture
- Yukon Development Corporation
- Yukon Liquor Corporation
We have completed transitioning:
- Economic Development
- Public Service Commission
- Women’s Directorate
- Yukon Housing Corporation