TfW: Digital Transformation For Wales' Transport Network

Services: Website Development, Bilingual Websites

The Starting Point

Transport for Wales is the Welsh Government-owned, not-for-profit company behind the country's rail network and much of its wider public transport, which makes it about as public sector as a website gets.

It also had a sprawling mass of websites, each with a different look and feel which all needed to be brought under a single domain and infrastructure following a change in corporate structure (what a thrilling sentence). TfW reached out to me to help lead the first phase of the work while they parted ways with their previous agency and moved to an in-house development team.

The Work

I worked with UX consultancy firm MK&A who provided the front end design and user journeys for the site along two contract backend developers who worked on the Drupal CMS, while I was responsible for rebuilding the web views and a number of interactive widgets to help people get where they needed to go and get the information they needed to around their journey.

The site is fully bilingual in Welsh and English, so the parts I built had to work (and fit) in both languages.

Over the course of the 12 months spent on the project we:

Completely rebuilt the website front end interface and user journeys
Merged the content from two outlying websites into a single domain
Built sub-site portals for news and luxury rail menus
Overhauled 7 Vue.JS powered widgets for booking and information
Built a new widget for tap-on-tap-off bus fare information
Co-authored maintenance and recovery documentation

Good stuff people have said about me:

"Alex was exactly what we needed for the Transport for Wales website project that we had been engaged to manage and deliver. He jumped in to help us consolidate multiple digital properties into one platform, and his front-end development skills made the whole process smooth and successful."