One site, many languages. many brands, one domain

One site, three brands

Fleura is an international wholesaler of cut flowers, accessories and pot plants operating in seven European countries. Its website is a source of information for florists to find local cash and carry stores and access store news and promotions. Operated under separate brands in Germany, (HBI Blumen) and Switzerland, (Hottinger) it was imporant for ebusiness manager Jeroen Diderik, to ensure there was a consistent brand look and feel throughout the website. Another consideration was that the pages at corporate level would be easily interchangeable in the three primary business languages of the company, Dutch, German and English and in more languages at deeper levels for local audiences.

Globalization, localization

Fleura has structured its site so that all the countries and stores reside at levels below the corporate information. Florists in Germany and Switzerland can still search under the local brand names and the information will be displayed on the primary site.

"We've used the same look and feel for each of the three brands, and no longer use green as a corporate colour for either HBI Blumen or Hottinger," comments Jeroen.

At a national level, country information is only displayed in the vernacular whereas all information at the corporate level can be accessed in Dutch German or English. Users can switch from one language to another by clicking on the right language tab.

"The ability to compare pages in two languages in EPiServer CMS is extremely important for us," says Jeroen. "Editors can aim to keep the overall page layout consistent despite the varying lengths of the text once translated. They can also check if everything on the page is translated as it should be."

Work flows and processes

At store level, local managers could add content but as yet all the content is maintained and managed from the Dutch headquarters.

"We have a local editor for the country site in Poland based in Warsaw but for the time being we keep control and oversee any changes in content throughout the site," says Jeroen.

"If a certain store has some news or a particular promotion they want to post, or advertise a job vacancy then they know to contact us and we add it to the site." Jeroen hopes that over time national and store managers will update the site themselves, he comments, "It's a matter of setting up the right access rights, workflow processes and giving contributors some training on how to use the CMS. "

At present Jeroen is supported by a team of three editors to keep the content up to date. He says,

"We use the built-in Image Editor to handle all our images. It does exactly what we need it to do. We've been able to import images by dragging them into the gallery and with one click the image is resized to the preset size."

Easy to work with EPiServer CMS

Macaw was the partner in charge of creating the design and development of the site. Peter Roling, Solution Center Manager at Macaw says, "We advised on the selection of EPiServer for its usability aspects around its multilingual capability. Although we've created a relatively complex site structure, usability levels remained high." Peter continues,

"Our developers found it very easy to adapt to working with EPiServer because of their .NET skills. We found it a robust and technically sound solution that is not vulnerable to defects. "Now the website is up and running smoothly, Jeroen has an eye on the future,"We'll probably restructure part of the website as the country layer is not working as well as we would like, in general, news gets added at either corporate level, such as when we announced our merger with Metz, or else at store level with job vacancies and special promotions.

"Other plans are to develop the company intranet using EPiServer Relate, EPiServer's community module. In time Jeroen would also like to create a community for florists. "We need to take a step at a time, after all we're working in an industry used to traditional ways of communicating. " he concludes.