The problem

EEOC.gov held 160,000+ pieces of content on a system more than a decade old, and all of it had to move to a responsive platform that rendered correctly on mobile, met accessibility requirements and served readers in English and Spanish. In addition, the EEOC needed stronger site search so users could find the right information on the site quickly, instead of turning to support staff and sending more requests for information. For a federal agency whose audience is most of the American workforce, every page that is hard to find or read is a cost to the public and to its own staff.‍

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Context

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) enforces the federal laws against discrimination at work. Those laws cover employers with at least 15 employees, along with most labor unions and employment agencies. The agency has more than 2,000 staff in 53 offices. At the time of the rebuild, EEOC.gov drew more than 10 million unique visitors a year. Success meant moving the full content library, delivering a faster site built on the U.S. Web Design System (USWDS), improved search, English and Spanish from launch, and room to add more languages later.

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Thanks to the entire team. You did a great job building this entire site and getting us to the point of meeting our goals.

Bryan Burnett, Chief Information Officer, EEOC

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Our approach

Migrating 160,000+ pieces of content

At 160,000+ pieces of content, this was a large migration, and at that size, data engineering is central to getting it right. Content needed to be extracted from the legacy system, mapped to a new content model, loaded and checked at scale, with English and Spanish versions kept paired, because no team can review that volume by hand. Phase2 moved the agency's full content library off a system more than a decade old and onto the new platform.

Drupal and USWDS for EEOC.gov

Phase2 led the modernization of EEOC.gov, working inside one team of EEOC employees and contractors to rebuild the site on Drupal 9 on Microsoft Azure. The front end adopted USWDS, the federal standard for accessible, mobile-friendly government sites. Drupal's Symfony-based framework loads module code only when a page needs it, instead of holding all of it in memory. The smaller memory footprint lets EEOC.gov run faster. The team also rebuilt site search, treating findability as a support cost: every answer a visitor finds on the site is a call or information request the agency doesn't have to handle.

English and Spanish on one platform

For an agency that serves most of the American workforce, language is an access issue. The same guidance has to exist, and stay current, in every language a worker or employer reads. That makes translation part of content management itself: every update to an English page has to reach its Spanish counterpart and any other language versions. Readers can switch between English and Spanish versions of content, and the platform was built to take on seven more languages in the future. Today the site's language menu also links to translated resources in languages including Arabic, Chinese, Haitian Creole, Korean, Russian, Tagalog, Vietnamese and Persian.

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Outcome

All 160,000+ pieces of content moved off a system more than ten years old, and EEOC.gov now runs on Drupal and USWDS in English and Spanish. The EEOC team received the agency's highest honor, the Chair's Excellence Award, for the initiative.

The work did not stop at launch. Planned next steps included more languages, search engine optimization and KPI tracking. Faster pages, better search and content in two languages all serve the goal the agency set at the start: workers and employers can find the information they need on their own, without a call or a request.