Operating on a global scale, ruhlamat GmbH will now present itself in three languages. The mid-sized special-machine manufacturer with headquarters in Marksuhl, Germany has subsidiaries in the USA, China, India and Malaysia and has therefore chosen to adapt its website to reflect its global presence.
ruhlamat commissioned the advertising agency kartinka of Erfurt, Germany to carry out the relaunch of the company's website in order to meet the current challenges of online marketing with the help of a professional partner. After six months of work, the new international ruhlamat website went online in May 2015.
About the project
In the beginning there was analysis
When the project first began, the greatest challenge was to coordinate the schedule and workload of the participants. Due to the size of the project, all areas of kartinka's expertise—from marketing and graphics to SEO and programming—had to be brought together constructively in order to guarantee a smooth process from start to relaunch.
The first step to relaunching the website was to comprehensively analyse the existing website and its content. It was only after this took place that optimizations and improvements could be implemented—with regard to functionality, target-group orientation and optical design of the website—in order to guarantee an effective and up-to-date presentation of ruhlamat GmbH on the Internet.
Management is everything
To ensure content elements of the website can be better processed by administrative departments in the future, all content was embedded in the Drupal content management system. As a result, the responsible employees are now able to create individual elements for the website without programming knowledge and to implement them independently from anywhere in the world.
The international presence of ruhlamat was also taken into account by offering trilingual web content. Depending on domain location, all texts are now available in German, English or Chinese. In addition, the ruhlamat website was expanded by including a newsletter and customer survey tool as well as by linking the social media platforms Facebook and Xing. Also, an interface to the human resources department will be added to the website in the coming weeks—all potential applicants will have the opportunity to apply online using a form on the website.
Additionally, the new concept included reducing the core content and performing a search-engine-optimised coordination of the content. A special keyword analysis was carried out and the existing structure of the website was once again revised to achieve this. The aim of these measures was to increase the overall clarity of the ruhlamat website and its user-friendliness while at the same time achieving a high position in search-engine rankings.
Making global collaboration easy
In order to coordinate the cooperation of the international ruhlamat branches even better in the future, we are now working on further merging the company websites of the individual locations in terms of technology and content in order to guarantee a uniform corporate identity throughout the network.
The website was also designed responsively so that all content can be presented in an appealing and target-group oriented manner on mobile devices. Together with all above-mentioned measures, ruhlamat GmbH will be ideally positioned to present its corporate philosophy and identity in an appealing and uniform manner on the Internet for years to come.
Why Drupal was chosen
Drupal provided the needed customizability for the different types of content on the website (e.g. Basic Pages, Products, News). The marketing team of the customer can easily manage the content on a basis, where no coding experience is needed. They are able to be creative in building their content anyway, by using predefined building blocks, provided by the Paragraph module.
Technical Specifications
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