Redevelopment of the General Dental Council website

Tender description

Summary of the work The supplier will design, build, test and deliver a new website and implement a new ASP.NET web CMS solution. The supplier will provide training on the use of the CMS, and support the website including developing appropriate content workflows and advising on ongoing improvements. Expected Contract Length Six months maximum Latest start date Monday 26 November 2018 Budget Range £60,000 excluding VAT Why the Work is Being Done www.gdc-uk.org does not meets our needs or those of our stakeholders. The new website should enable users to easily find and engage with the information they require, complete tasks, and understand our role and aims. The site also needs to better reflect who we are as an organisation. We need a supplier to design, build, implement and support a new website on an ASP.NET platform, developing and completing UAT sign-off within their own environment. Supplier is expected to deploy the signed off solution into GDC provided environments (development and live). Long-term, GDC will host within our Microsoft Azure platform. Problem to Be Solved Align website with user needs to meet organisational priorities and goals while adhering to best-practice standards in design and UX. Existing site suffers from poor navigation and search (leading to usability and findability issues), outdated content and is not optimised for SEO. We need to work with a supplier on a new design and IA that gives us a strong foundation to keep developing. https://dcs.gdc-uk.org (>20 pages) will also need to be migrated to the new platform with no content or design changes. Online register and member area (eGDC) are out of scope but require basic integration. Who Are the Users Users can be general public with accessibility requirements as well as professionals. As a patient I need to know what types of complaints the GDC deals with so I know if they can help me or not. As a dental professional I need to know the Standards for the Dental Team to ensure I'm following best practice at all times. As a stakeholder I need to find and respond to consultations so I can influence final policy decisions. Work Already Done Please look at current website launched February 2017 on Sharepoint 2013 to see existing content. Existing Team The website project (internally) will be managed by the project team which will include the following roles: Digital Communication Manager (Project lead) Executive Director, Strategy (Project sponsor) Head of Communications and Engagement Head of IT Project Manager Communication Officer IT Team - Hosting, support and technical Additionally, we have other internal stakeholders who might be called on as required. It isn't anticipated that the supplier will work with any other agencies. Current Phase Not applicable Skills & Experience • Demonstrable experience and track record in designing and developing responsive websites on an ASP.NET based platform. • Full service digital agency with a full complement of roles including IA, UX, technical, build, development and support. • Experience delivering digital services to at least a AA WCAG 2.0 web accessibility standard and an awareness of WCAG 2.1. • Experience of optimising sites for continued improvement using Google analytics. • Experience of working with internal IT teams to arrange hosting and integration with existing services • Evidence of content design skills to optimise engagement. • Understanding of non-functional requirements and experience of building these into a web project such as usability, security, accessibility, availability, scalability and compatibility. • Expert in Google Analytics and experienced in setting up and achieving goal conversions. • Agile project management experience involving third party clients. • A good understanding of content optimised for SEO (on-page, architecture and technical) and engagement. • Can provide examples of successful website integrations with APIs, other applications and databases. • Experience in facilitating user testing throughout a web project. • Examples of pro-actively suggesting or trying new/emerging technologies with clients. • Experience of building site wide searches. Work Location 37 Wimpole Street London W1G 8DQ Working Arrangments It is expected to be a mixture of on-site and off-site working. If on-site, the supplier will be working predominately at the GDC office site in London with a possibility of Birmingham. After initial face-to-face discovery meetings, we would expect regular weekly progress calls as the project progresses, as well as visual updates. Members of the GDC project team can also spend time at the supplier's location, if required. Additional T&Cs We have amended the standard gov.uk terms and conditions to include GDPR requirements. If you would like to see a copy, please let us know. No. of Suppliers to Evaluate 5 Proposal Criteria • Technical solution. • Approach and methodology. • Identified risks and dependencies and offered approaches to manage them. • Value for money. • User focus. Cultural Fit Criteria • work as a team with our organisation and internal IT team in particular • be familiar with the cultures, governance structures and set-up of a regulatory organisation • be innovative and challenge the status quo • share knowledge and experience with other team members • take responsibility for their work • be transparent and collaborative when making decisions Payment Approach Fixed price Evaluation Weighting Technical competence 55% Cultural fit 10% Price 35% Questions from Suppliers 1. What is the technical rationale for deciding on ASP.NET as the basis for this build? Would other technologies be considered? Our internal IT team will be managing the hosting and security of the website going forward and are only able to support an ASP.NET based platform such as Umbraco or Sitecore. Unfortunately we're unable to consider other technologies. 2. Could you please describe the rationale behind the requirement for this to be an ASP.NET solution and confirm whether there is any flexibility around this if we were to propose an alternative solution? Thank you. Please see previous answer. 3. Does the scope cover the extranet eGDC? eGDC is our transactional member area and is not included in the scope of this project. 4. Is it possible to elaborate on the workflow relating to a complaint submitted via the complaint website? Does the complaint get routed to different people / departments depending on the type?Do they need to track all correspondence sent to the complainant the moment they submit the complaint? The complaints area contained within https://contactus.gdc-uk.org is out of the scope of this project. It will need to be integrated within the IA of the new site and re-skinned, but not rebuilt or redesigned. 5. Do they have a registry of dentists and do we need to integrate with it? If so how is access derived? API? Direct database connection? We have an online register which sits here as a separate site and is out of the project scope - https://olr.gdc-uk.org/SearchRegisterIt will need to be pulled through to the homepage as it is currently using an API. 6. Is the secure area for dental professionals out of scope for this engagement?Is https://contactus.gdc-uk.org a separate website? Is it in scope for this engagement? These are both out of scope other than basic skinning and integration. 7. Are there any existing manual, offline processes that you’d like to create forms for? Such as these: https://www.gdc-uk.org/professionals/details ? Or these: https://www.gdc-uk.org/about/work-for-gdc ? All forms sit within https://contactus.gdc-uk.org/ which feeds in to our CRM. These will continue to be managed by our internal IT team. 8. Can you provide us basic analytic data including number of unique visitors, top trafficked pages, and top browsers that have accessed this site over the past 12 months? We've had 3.8 million page views from 1.4 million users in the last 12 months. The most popular pages are all in the /professionals section, especially CPD, ORE, Registration and Standards. Browser split is 45% Chrome, 28% Safari, 14% IE, 6% Edge. 9. What is your existing site wide search based on? Is it Lucene / SQL / Elastic search or any other? With the existing budget, i hope you are expecting only some enhancements to existing search technology. Kindly confirm. The existing SharePoint site uses Node.js and Elasticsearch. We want to move the CMS away from SharePoint and expect the search technology to reflect the budget while also rectifying existing issues and meeting user requirements. 10. Does the GDC have a set of digital brand guidelines that we can adhere to? We do have brand guidelines which the current site was based on, although we'd like the new site to be more visually engaging . These will be made available to shortlisted suppliers. 11. Do you have a particular level of standards compliance you want to adhere to? All our content MUST conform at least with Level A of the guidelines. Ultimately, we're aiming for all our content to conform with Level AA of guidelines. 12. What CRM are you currently using? We use Microsoft Dynamics CRM to manage registrant details. Interaction with the CRM falls out of the scope of this project as it's currently handled by https://www.egdc-uk.org 13. Do they have any suggested new technologies you would like to work with? or you have considered before? We're open to ideas regarding technologies, as long as they're ASP.NET based. We have around 60 content editors internally so ease of use and adaptable workflow are important. 14. Are your organisational goals documented? If so can you share them with us? Our goals are documented in our regulatory reform document, Shifting the balance:https://www.gdc-uk.org/about/what-we-do/shifting-the-balancePages 18-20 are particularly relevant to this piece of work. 15. Can you please confirm that you only need the Information Architecture for www.gdc-uk.org to be redesigned, and all other URL’s just need pointing to, reskinning or migrating across as is? That's correct. The online register, contact us pages and eGDC just need reskinning or pointing to. The DCS site just needs migrating over as is. 16. Does the site wide search need to consider the API's or other software applications? No, only pages on gdc-uk.org. The online register can remain separate as can eGDC and the contact us forms. 17. please can you confirm if the budget includes support costs?please can you confirm the reasons for replatforming when the site only just went live on SharePoint and is only 18 months old?please can you confirm if you have an incumbent, or any current/ongoing engagement with a supplier?please can you confirm if you if you have a preference of.NET technology? The budget doesn't include support costs. We'd like suppliers to give indicative costs for a yearly support contract going forward.Currently the website is managed by our internal IT team. SharePoint was chosen as a platform due to internal skill sets but is restrictive and no longer meets our needs. We'd like an external provider to work with us to evolve and improve the website going forward.We have no existing suppliers as the site is currently internally supported.We have no preference of technology but want to keep improving the site so need it to be flexible. 18. What API's and other software applications do you need or intend to link to? We need to pull basic info from our online register (https://olr.gdc-uk.org/searchregister) which we currently do on the homepage.Other than that, we'll just be pointing to sub domains or reskinning. 19. Do you have an overall breakdown of the budget? The stated budget is for discovery, UX, design, development and delivery of the new site. The budget doesn't include support costs and we'd like suppliers to give indicative costs for a yearly support contract going forward. 20. Should the supplier provide UAT and Dev environments for the SharePoint sites that need re-skinning or will they be provided by the client? We'd like the development partner to develop and complete UAT for both the GDC and DCS websites within their own hosting environment.Other than that, we'll need wireframes with full CSS and images to be supplied so our internal IT team can apply the design to web applications (such as contactus.gdc-uk.org) within existing development, UAT and live environments.