Maintenance and technical development of SPKC websites

01, Chapter

The brief

SPKC's websites needed regular technical maintenance, improvements to functionality and design, and a rapid response when unexpected problems arose. We began working together in April 2019, across six websites, with particular attention to spkc.gov.lv.

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, spkc.gov.lv became one of the most important sources of official information in Latvia and saw a very sharp rise in traffic. At that point, maintenance had a practical job to do - keeping the site available at a time when public demand for up-to-date information was especially high.

02, Chapter

The solution

We improved the site's speed and technical configuration, dealt with unexpected problems and made recommendations on security features and good practice. The changes had to be made to the existing site while leaving content editors able to publish up-to-date information quickly.

In its reference, SPKC also drew particular attention to support outside normal office hours, and to our ability to listen to what content editors needed and offer several possible solutions. In a crisis, this mattered just as much as the coding itself - the technical team had to respond to a changing situation and work alongside SPKC.

At the end of February 2020, right at the start of COVID-19, spkc.gov.lv began to suffer outages. Within a few days we diagnosed the performance fault, throttled and fixed the search, testing it against XSS attacks as well, and tightened the security of administrative access.

In 2021 we moved the campaign site tirizobi.lv from an outdated custom-built solution to Drupal, gave it a responsive design and restored the game built into the site.

04, Chapter

The result

During our work together, we provided technical maintenance and troubleshooting for SPKC's websites, including when both the importance of spkc.gov.lv and the load on it were growing rapidly. The client's signed reference describes the work as professional and effective, and highlights deadlines met, the quality of the work and our understanding of how a public institution works.

• Maintenance and technical improvements for six websites managed by SPKC.
• Speed improvements to spkc.gov.lv and prompt handling of technical problems during the period of high load.
• Security recommendations, and support that extended outside normal office hours when the situation called for it.

05, Chapter

Expertise applied

Technical website maintenance, performance optimisation, server and application configuration, security recommendations and prompt technical support.