Ohio Department of Public Safety: 28 websites brought together into five division sites under one navigation

A parent teaching a teenager to drive, a family getting ready for severe weather, a private investigator renewing a license, a police department applying for a body-camera grant, someone requesting the report of a crash the State Highway Patrol investigated. All of them are looking for the Ohio Department of Public Safety, and each needs a different part of it.

In 2021 each of the department’s five divisions, the State Highway Patrol, Emergency Medical Services, the Emergency Management Agency, the Office of Criminal Justice Services and Ohio Homeland Security, had its own website, and around them had grown a crowd of stand-alone program sites: ReadyOhio beside the Emergency Management Agency’s site, separate sites for private investigator licensing and for the State’s terrorism analysis center, three sites for traffic safety, driver training and teen drivers, and one site per dashboard for OVI, distracted-driving and work-zone crash statistics. The department wanted to end the information silos and the duplicate content across its divisions.

When the State put the work out to bid in November 2021, it was clear that this was not to be a “lift and shift” of each site onto the InnovateOhio Platform, the State’s shared web platform, but one experience across the agency, with a content governance framework the divisions could keep up themselves, built by the end of 2022.

An audit of every site, with every division

We started in February 2022 with requirements workshops with the department and each of its divisions, then explored the content of every existing site and ran content rationalization with the divisions to decide what to keep, merge or retire. For Homeland Security and Criminal Justice Services we compared the old sites with the new structure link by link before anything moved.

Structures tested before they were built

For each division we drew a new information architecture around what people come to do, prototyped it for desktop and phone, and tested it with members of the public in tree tests before building it: the Highway Patrol first, in May 2022, then the Emergency Management Agency in two rounds, the Traffic Safety Office, Emergency Medical Services, Criminal Justice Services and Homeland Security. Those structures are the menus people use today, from the Emergency Management Agency’s Prepare & Respond and Mitigation & Recovery to EMS’s Certifications, Education & Testing and Medical Transportation Licensing.

One navigation across the department

We designed and built a department-wide switcher in the header of the division sites, on desktop and phone, so a person who lands on the wrong division can move to the right one, or to the department’s main site, in one step.

Templates the department can reuse

We built three reusable templates, a splash page for new initiatives, a statistics dashboard page and a large-document pattern for plans and manuals, and used them for the Highway Patrol’s OVI, distracted-driving and work-zone dashboards, the State hazard mitigation plan on the Emergency Management Agency site, and splash pages for initiatives such as the solar eclipse and the Ohio Cyber Collaboration Committee.

Content moved, checked and handed over

Division staff curated their own content with our support, following the platform’s Content-First method, and we exported, cleaned and imported it. We validated the sites against Section 508 before launch and fixed what the review found, trained the divisions’ authors, reviewers and approvers, ran analytics training and updated the how-to guides they work from.

The Highway Patrol site went live on August 31, 2022, with a site for the Ohio Investigative Unit; the Ohio Traffic Safety Office, which gathered the driver-training and teen-driver sites, followed the next day, and the other divisions in the months after, with post-launch support and a roadmap into March 2023.

Four years on, in September 2026, the division sites still run on the InnovateOhio Platform with the structures we tested, and 13 of the old program addresses lead into them: ready.ohio.gov opens the Emergency Management Agency’s Prepare & Respond, the private investigator licensing site opens Homeland Security’s licensing section, and the teen-driver site opens the Traffic Safety Office’s section for parents and teens.

We ran the program for the department from audit to post-launch support, building on our earlier work bringing its first program sites, such as Motorcycle Ohio and the Ohio School Safety Center, onto the platform in 2019–2021. How the platform itself came together is told in the foundation under Ohio’s digital front door.