Monier Roofing

In March 2007, the private-equity group PAI Partners bought a controlling 65% in the former roofing materials department of the Lafarge Group, "Lafarge Roofing". With its 12,000 workers and 84 business units in 46 countries, the newly-founded roofing company, the "MONIER Group", has become the world leader in sloped-roof construction. In the context of the takeover and name change, a new web presence was also called for. AOE media was given complete responsibility for its technical realization, developing an integrated, TYPO3-based solution for the MONIER Group's total of 24 Websites in 17 languages.

---

The commercial formation of the group, and the consequent necessity of redesigning its websites, gave MONIER the chance to replace its former Web Content Management System - IBM Websphere, which was costly and required an annual license, with something more up to date. Working together with Ogilvy Primary Contact, London - responsible for concept and design - we introduced the license-free and Open Source CMS TYPO3. Not only was the entire content of the Lafarge Roofing sites transferred into the new MONIER Group design, including the creation and integration of the required XHTML-enabled templates, but also a variety of Flexible Content Elements (FCEs). These now offer the MONIER Group editors a great deal more freedom in the arrangement of the site as well as real-time editing possibilities.

 

A particular highlight of the site is the MONIER Group product catalogue, especially conceived for the TYPO3 CMS and extremely complete. Via a custom developed extension, several thousand products are presented in an attractive and comprehensible manner. Linked to a photo gallery, which contains reference projects sorted by region, product and other keywords, and displayed using AJAX technology, the MONIER Group now possesses comprehensive possibilities for presenting its wide range of products. In addition, searches can be made for items throughout the entire system by using the product finder, as it is called, a custom-built extension that is perfectly adapted for functioning both inside and outside the catalogue.

Alongside the product catalogue, a variety of standard TYPO3 extensions, as well as custom extensions were part of the package. The MONIER site features TYPO3 standard extensions to facilitate newsletters, download possibilities (such as product data-sheets), an integrated search function and embedded forms. In addition, for the purpose of "lead management", the processing and transfer of potential client indicator data, a special extension was developed and installed to MONIER's particular specifications. Equally interesting is a custom extension designed to integrate the Google-Maps service, so that site visitors can easily locate the MONIER Group partner or product outlet nearest to them. And, last but not least, all the MONIER Group websites were optimized for search machine crawler-bots and site rankings.

This TYPO3 solution has been developed for flexibility by AOE media, so that it can be inexpensively and easily augmented with further websites or modules to keep pace with the dynamic growth of the MONIER Group.

Link:
http://www.monier.com