back to top link

Steppin’ it up at SAMHSA

digital design flowchart

Steppin’ it up at SAMHSA

The SeKON SAMHSA (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services) team has endeavored this quarter to complete a lift and shift of theming from an Omega base to a USWDS (United States Web Design System) base. This significantly cleaned up the back-end of the Drupal site, with the removal of many custom modules, blocks, and legacy code, which in turn enabled the team to simultaneous update the site from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9. Both efforts of development are complete and are in QA to be deployed by mid-July, after they have been integrated with each other. All these changes to the back-end have been in preparation of a complete site refresh.

The redesign began at the end of May, and includes more USWDS components, taxonomical changes, new styling, and content administration updates. To add a new perspective and to aid SeKON in redesigning the entire site, SeKON subcontracted out to District Design Group and added new ICF UX/UI resources. The new UX/UI Design team is developing a roadmap, initiating the discovery phase, beginning to define personas and journey maps, and analyzing samhsa.gov heat-maps and Google Analytics. We’re very excited for all the changes that are to come with the redesign and look forward to building a new and improved SAMHSA.gov!