Web development

Content management systems (CMSs)

Salsa Digital uses open source CMSs Drupal (and the Australian Government-branded version GovCMS) and Wordpress to create websites that deliver all the benefits of the open source movement. This is part of our commitment to all things open — open CMS, open data, open platform and open design. It’s also an integral part of our involvement in the open government movement and our focus on helping governments and enterprises become more open, more connected and more consolidated.

Open source technologies deliver many benefits, including:

• Reduced costs

• Global and active communities, global and active adoption

• Minimised vendor lock-in, and the unfortunately too common ‘$ proprietary liability’

• Reduced risks (code has already been tested and used)

• Collaboration and knowledge sharing

Drupal is an enterprise-grade, open source CMS that’s highly maintained and secure, with over a million community contributors globally and strong worldwide adoption. It’s also won several international open source CMS awards and is used by many leading private organisations, governments, not-for-profits and academia.

GovCMS is the tailored Drupal distribution selected by the Australian Federal Government. It delivers all the benefits of Drupal, while being specifically built for Australian government agencies with the digital service standards in mind. GovCMS is a growing platform with a strong community. On 18 July 2018 Salsa Digital won the contract to build the new GovCMS platform in partnership with amazee.io.

Wordpress is a leading open source CMS and the most popular website management tool used today. It’s used by big brand names such as Disney, BBC America and The Australian.

Our methodology

We follow a step-by-step process to deliver the best website possible. Our methodology is based on our five service pillars:

• Strategy — analysing your business problem, possible solutions and budget.

• Design — encompassing both look and feel (visuals) and user interface (for optimal usability and accessibility).

• Engineering — frontend and backend engineering to deliver a robust and secure website.

• Training — once your site is built, we handover with CMS training.

• Support— we also provide ongoing support for many of our clients.

We also follow an agile project delivery methodology to help drive continuous change and ensure we evolve as the project does. Agile is a collaborative approach that focuses on work across teams (and in our case often between Salsa and our client), with adaptive planning and continuous improvement. Salsa currently has five certified scrum masters on our team.

Our developers

Our developers have strong skillsets in Wordpress, Drupal, GovCMS, PHP, containers, Lagoon, CKAN, OpenShift, Kubernetes and Vue.JS. We have Acquia certified developers in-house, and three in-house Acquia certified trainers. One of our technical leads is also an Acquia Drupal Grandmaster.

Our services

Salsa offers services across the full range of the project, including:

• Assessment and readiness — We'll assess your site’s viability for different CMSs and recommend the best fit. Salsa will also look at business requirements and solution direction, functional mapping and high-level project costings.

• Technical and visual design — Design, lead, coach, guide and direct visual and technical design as necessary.

• Build and migration — Site build and configuration to meet key functional requirements, content migration, and CMS theming/module development (if applicable).

• Integration — Integrate your site with open data (e.g. CKAN integration), EDM platforms (e.g. Campaign Monitor or Mailchimp), CRM systems such as Salesforce and Oracle, payment gateways (e.g. PayPal and Stripe), single sign-on systems like LDAP and Active Directory, and social platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.

• Quality assurance and testing — Site audits, user testing and performance testing.

• Application support — Ad-hoc enhancements and bug fixes, site management, release management and technical governance.

• Documentation — Functional documentation, technical documentation and user manuals.

• Agile — Option for full agile delivery led by Salsa including services such as discovery, user stories, sprint planning, code/config reviews, user acceptance testing (UAT), daily standups and overall project governance and stakeholder comms OR augmented agile delivery with Salsa providing key expert resources and/or SCRUM teams to augment client-led agile project delivery.

• Training — Drupal and GovCMS training courses and customised courses to meet your needs.

Salsa's services also focus on the delivery of whole-of-government digital platforms, such as Victoria's Single Digital Presence (SDP) and Australia's GovCMS.

Get in touch

We’ve been helping government agencies and private organisations around Australia build and enhance their websites for over 15 years. Use the form below or call us on 1300 727 952 to chat about your web development needs.