Minnesota Public Employees Retirement Association - PERA
The Minnesota Public Employees Retirement Association (PERA) needed an experienced web agency to redesign, refresh, migrate, and provide maintenance for the PERA website. PERA selected Nighthawk because of our experience in Drupal CMS development, government website design, user experience planning, accessibility, responsive design, Acquia hosting, information architecture, content migration, and long-term website support.
Minnesota Public Employees Retirement Association Website
PERA administers retirement benefits for public employees throughout Minnesota. The PERA website serves a wide range of audiences, including active members, retirees, employers, public agencies, and individuals seeking retirement-related information, forms, resources, events, and online services. Because the website plays an important role in helping users understand retirement benefits and access key information, PERA needed a platform that was easier to manage, more accessible, and better aligned with modern digital expectations.
The Need
PERA’s existing website was built in WordPress and needed to be migrated to Drupal. At a high level, the project required Nighthawk to migrate the current PERA website from WordPress to Drupal, review and refresh the website design, and provide ongoing maintenance and support.
PERA also needed help evaluating how the new Drupal website could improve content management, page layout flexibility, accessibility, search, media organization, site alerts, employer information, event functionality, and overall maintainability. The existing website relied on several WordPress plug-ins and tools, and PERA wanted to understand how those capabilities could be recreated or improved in Drupal using content types, views, taxonomy, media entities, components, contributed modules, and Drupal best practices.
The project also included a significant content migration effort, including approximately 160 pages and 500 PDF, Excel, Word, and PowerPoint files into the Drupal media library. PERA also needed user acceptance testing, accessibility testing, cross-browser testing, staff training, documentation, site launch support, and ongoing maintenance for bug fixes and minor enhancements.
The Solution
Nighthawk planned and executed a redesign and replatforming process to move PERA from WordPress to Drupal. The project included discovery, UX research and testing, information architecture, web strategy, content inventory and audit, wireframe design, responsive visual design, front-end development, back-end development, content migration, testing, launch, staff training, documentation, project management, and ongoing support.
The new Drupal website was designed to provide a more structured and maintainable foundation for PERA’s content. Nighthawk configured Drupal environments, created content types, views, taxonomy, and a best-practice set of modules to support the website’s long-term management. The front-end theme was coded using Bootstrap and HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to support responsive design and a consistent user experience across devices.
Nighthawk also helped PERA think through how Drupal could replace or improve functionality previously handled through WordPress plug-ins. This included support for events, maps, page alerts, accordions, employer lists, analytics, media organization, page layout components, video library content, filtered publications and forms, and flexible landing page structures.
The result was a refreshed, Drupal-based website foundation designed to improve accessibility, content management, responsive design, searchability, editor experience, and long-term maintainability for a complex public-sector retirement website.
