The Outcome
The result is a website that transforms how Argyll & Bute Council serves its community. It’s modern, fast, and fully accessible. It's proof that a council website can meet high technical standards while still looking good and being easy to use.
Residents can now find information faster, complete tasks online, and access services with ease. The Council team has full control of the site, using a design library that makes updates quick and keeps everything consistent.
Most importantly, the site now meets all accessibility standards, making it easy for every resident to use — no matter their ability.
For us, this project was especially rewarding. Working with such a dedicated team gave us the chance to combine accessibility with great design and create a website that truly benefits thousands of people across the region.
The Brief
Argyll & Bute Council serves one of the biggest areas in Scotland, covering both towns and islands. It provides important services like housing, schools, transport, and environmental care for people who live and work there.
Their goal is to create a stronger, more connected region by using digital tools to make public services easier to reach. But with such a large and remote area to cover, their website needed to do more than share information. It had to be reliable, simple, and easy for everyone to use.
When the Council came to us, they knew what they wanted. They needed a website that was simple to navigate, fully accessible, and easy for their team to update and grow.
They teamed up with Inspire for a major web project to improve how their digital services worked. Their website is the main place residents and visitors go for local information, so it needed to be fast, reliable, and easy for everyone to use.
Their old website was built on Drupal 9, and part of our job was to upgrade it to Drupal 10. We also added LocalGov Drupal (LGD), a system made specifically for UK councils. This gave the Council access to built-in tools for public services, saving time while keeping everything high quality and consistent.
The main challenge was meeting strict WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility standards while still creating a great user experience. Council websites are often seen as plain or hard to use, but we wanted to show that accessibility and good design can go hand in hand.