The foundation under Ohio’s digital front door

In 2017 the State of Ohio set out to give residents one digital front door: a shared platform for Ohio.gov and every agency site, in place of hundreds of websites built and run separately. The program, led by Deloitte, chose IBM WebSphere Portal (today HCL Digital Experience), and Deloitte brought Base22 in for its depth on that platform.

The hard part was never one website. It was making a single platform serve many agencies, each with its own content, audiences and authors, without every new site becoming a fork of the code, and without governance breaking down as the platform grew.

2017–2019: Ohio.gov and the site builder

Base22 redesigned and rebuilt Ohio.gov as the first site on the new platform, organized around what people come for: residents, tourism, jobs, business and State government. In parallel we built the site builder, later called the Website Accelerator: shared templates, components and authoring workflows that let a new agency site start from the platform instead of from scratch. It carried the enterprise patterns of our Portal Blueprint, the component framework and governance we had refined on large corporate portals, and it became the foundation every later site was built on. Its components were tested against Section 508 and WCAG from the start. The first agency sites on it were Agriculture, Health and the Bureau of Workers’ Compensation.

2019: A name people could remember

In March 2019 Base22 designed the InnovateOhio Platform’s logo, in official, short and “Powered by” versions, and helped define how the platform and its products are explained to the agencies it serves. A month later, the Governor launched the InnovateOhio Platform and, by Executive Order 2019-15D, required every agency, board and commission to adopt it. The IOP logo the State uses today is the one we designed.

2019–2022: Agency after agency

Working directly for the State, Base22 brought agency after agency onto the platform: Developmental Disabilities, Insurance, Transportation and DriveOhio, the Public Utilities Commission, Medicaid, Commerce, the Ohio EPA and Mental Health and Addiction Services. For the Department of Public Safety we audited 28 websites and consolidated them into five division sites under one navigation.

2023–2024: One brand change, more than 60 sites

When the State adopted the “Ohio, The Heart of it All” brand, Base22 led the rollout across more than 60 State websites on the platform, from Ohio.gov and myOhio to agency and program sites, between October 2023 and January 2024. Because the sites share one foundation, the rebrand was a platform change delivered in weekly releases, not 60 separate redesigns.

2025–2026: The next platform

The platform is moving from HCL Digital Experience to Contentful, and Base22 is building on it: jfs.ohio.gov for Job and Family Services, the Ohio Board of Nursing, the Department of Education and Workforce (in progress) and Tech4Me for Opportunities for Ohioans with Disabilities, which meets WCAG 2.1 AAA.

By the State’s own count in May 2025, the InnovateOhio Platform ran 161 websites for more than 260 agencies, boards and commissions (State of Ohio, NASCIO 2025 submission).

Base22 is one of several partners behind that platform. Our part is the layer the rest stands on: the first site, the site builder and its governance, the brand, and more than 40 agency websites across 56 engagements since 2017.

The clearest proof is what happened when the State changed its brand: one foundation carried the change to more than 60 sites in four months. Nine years in, the platform is changing technology, and we are still building on it.