Benidorm.org: two decades building a city’s digital platform.

Benidorm is a city with a diverse and highly visible public agenda. Its digital presence has to make institutional information, municipal services, communications, employment, Film Office activity, tourism-related information and smart-city initiatives easier to find and use. It must do so for different audiences, in several languages and across devices—while giving many municipal teams the autonomy to keep their own information current.

The ambition was never limited to launching a website. It was to create a digital foundation that could keep pace with the city: one capable of incorporating new services, editorial needs, regulations and technologies without losing clarity for the people who use it every day.

Our relationship with Benidorm City Council began in 2008. Over time, we helped turn an initial collection of sector-specific websites into an integrated multiportal solution. Instead of maintaining separate technology stacks and disconnected editorial processes, the City Council gained a shared content platform, common governance and a reusable set of capabilities.

The platform brings together a range of municipal touchpoints—including the citizen portal, communication, Film Office and European Funds sites—and is prepared to incorporate further initiatives such as beaches and open data. Each portal can serve its own audience and content priorities, while drawing on the same core architecture, shared functionality and editorial principles.

This model makes the platform more coherent for the public and more efficient for the organisation. Improvements to the core can be extended across the ecosystem; information can be managed from a unified repository; and teams can publish closer to their areas of responsibility through defined roles and workflows.

The latest evolution was approached as a careful improvement of an established public service, not as a cosmetic redesign. We reviewed the information architecture and interface patterns of the portals to make navigation, content discovery and access to relevant municipal information more direct. The visual language was updated to create a consistent, responsive experience while allowing each portal to retain its own context.

The work also extended behind the interface. We improved the editorial experience for the departments that publish content, with clearer administration tools, contextual guidance and flexible page structures for the different municipal areas. This gives teams greater control over how they present their services and activities while helping maintain quality standards across the platform.

Artificial intelligence was incorporated as a practical capability within that evolution. It supports content discovery, helps with translation and assists editors with accessibility validation and image-related SEO tasks. Rather than being a separate product, it works inside the content workflow, reducing repetitive work and helping teams preserve quality at scale.

The current platform is based on Drupal 11 and a decoupled architecture that separates content, APIs and front-end applications. This makes it possible to evolve each layer independently, share data and services more easily, and introduce new digital touchpoints without rebuilding the entire ecosystem.

The migration was planned as a continuity exercise: preserving existing content, functionality, user accounts and URLs while renewing the underlying platform. Alongside the core upgrade, the solution provides capabilities for multilingual publishing, automated translation support, editorial accessibility validation, web analytics and integration with the Electronic Office, the city’s Smart Destination platform and WhatsApp.

Accessibility is treated as a platform responsibility, not as a final-stage check. It informs the public interfaces as well as the editorial workflows, helping the City Council’s distributed publishing teams produce clearer, more inclusive content from the start.

Two decades of collaboration have created a deep understanding of the platform, the City Council’s operating model and the evolving needs of Benidorm. That continuity helps us move from a new requirement to an informed solution quickly: we can protect what already works, anticipate dependencies across the ecosystem and make changes with the long-term health of the platform in mind.

Working alongside Telefónica España, Paginar combines UX and development expertise throughout that evolution. The relationship is not limited to maintaining software: it is a sustained partnership that turns ongoing learning into better digital services for the city.