Structure

The LocalGov Drupal distribution organises content around the services that UK councils (Local Government) provide.

This follows the information architecture developed and tested at Brighton & Hove and Croydon councils and documented well by The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

The premise is that most visitors to a council website want one piece of information or to do one thing, then leave. Most of the information people want falls under one of the 'service areas' a council provies.

For example, services might include "Council tax" or "Rubbish, recycling and streets".

Services content types

• Services have a Service Landing Page, eg: Rubbish and Recycling. This is essentially a collection of links and gives a high level overview with links to specific common actions eg: order a bin and links to service sublanding pages.
• The Service Sublanding Page is a second level of hierarchy, eg: Garden Waste. providing a more specific collection of links to information or actions for the service eg: what goes in your garden waste bin.
• The Service Page contains the content, usually one specific piece of information for the service or a starting point to take an action. A service page can be placed directly into one Service Landing Page or in one Service Sublanding page.

The hierarchy is only ever two layers deep. Surfacing related information in different ways can be done with Topics which are not only related to the specific service, but can tag content that falls under multiple services.

@todo link to demosite services section - screenshot

The pages can additionally be structured with step-by-step, guide and directory navigation. Information or actions can be grouped across services in topics.

Step By Step

Following the pattern from gov.uk this provides pages containing the individual steps or tasks, with an overview of the process.

A step-by-step overview can, but does not have to be, placed into a service. Additionally a step-by-step overview can be added to topics, so it can be found collected with similar content in different services.

Guide

A guide operates much as a sublanding page but offers additional contents and previous-next pagination. It has an overview of the contents and description of the guide, and pages that contain the individual information or tasks.

A guide overview can, but does not have to be, placed into a service. Additionally a guide overview can be added to topics, so it can be found collected with similar content in different services. [@tobeconfirmed](https://github.com/localgovdrupal/localgov_topics/issues/4) As guides contain a specific set of content the topic should cover every page in the guide. So pages are not in topics but the guide itself.