Vermont.gov — Unified Digital Services Platform

The Brief

• Vermont.gov is the state’s digital front door: common services, agency directory, and top tasks for residents and businesses.
• The platform is genuinely consolidated — most agencies already share one Drupal 10 stack on Acquia.
• The concept modernizes the front door and completes the estate: better services navigation, unified search, and a plan to absorb the legacy outliers.

Audit Findings

• One Drupal 10 platform on Acquia, nginx + F5 BIG-IP edge, HTTP/2, working cache — a solid foundation.
• Agency pages share the stack but present inconsistently — no single services information architecture.
• Search and services discovery could be one unified layer instead of per-agency.
• Legacy outliers remain off-platform (ASP.NET registry, WordPress marketing, Silverstripe legislature, MODX historical society).
• Homepage ≈ 49 KB; images and assets unoptimized in places.

Approach

• Rebuild the front door as a component design system on the existing Drupal 10/Acquia platform.
• Introduce a single services information architecture with top-task and lifecycle navigation (live here, work here, run a business, get a service).
• Unify search across agencies and legacy sites.
• Plan the legacy absorption: registry, marketing cluster, legislature, and MODX onto the platform.
• WCAG 2.2 AA / Section 508 across agency templates.

Deliverables

• Component design system for Vermont.gov
• Services IA + top-task navigation
• Unified state search
• Legacy-site consolidation roadmap
• Redesigned homepage, agency, and service templates
• WCAG 2.2 AA / Section 508
• Performance budget + image pipeline
• Editor training

Evidence

Audited 2026-08. Live requests to vermont.gov and www.vermont.gov: response headers, platform signatures, and page markup inspected; agency sub-sites sampled.

• Drupal 10 platform hosted on Acquia Cloud — confirmed by the x-ah-environment: prod response header.
• Served via F5 BIG-IP → nginx → Acquia, HTTP/2; edge/back-end caching active (x-cache-hits, max-age 1080).
• Homepage HTML ≈ 49 KB.
• Unified platform across agencies — SOS, tax, governor, health, DMV, judiciary, DFR, ANR, VCGI, VSP, treasurer, auditor, VTrans all serve Drupal 10.
• Estate not fully unified: vermontbusinessregistry.com (ASP.NET), the WordPress marketing cluster, legislature (Silverstripe), and Vermont Historical Society (MODX) remain off-platform.

Timeline

Discovery 2 wks · Design system 4 wks · Build 8 wks · Legacy migration 6 wks · Launch + handover 2 wks (~22 weeks).