An Island Web Design multi-lingual website for Phoslock Europe GmbH

About the company

Phoslock Europe GmbH is a wholly owned subsidiary of Phoslock Environmental Technologies (PET) of Melbourne, Australia.

Phoslock Environmental Technologies is the manufacturer and intellectual property owner of Phoslock, a geo-engineered phosphorus-binding clay material developed by the Commonwealth Scientific Research Organisation (CSIRO) of Australia, in the nineties. 

With operational bases in the UK, Germany, the Netherlands and Italy, Phoslock Europe GmbH is the exclusive licensee of the Phoslock technology across Europe.

We were fortunate that Phoslock provided all the written content for the site because this is a very specialised subject and rich in the use of scientific language and references.

The main challenge for us was to not only take this content, and design the most appropriate lay-out around it, but to also keep it individual while not departing too far from the parent company's 'look and feel'.

To achieve this, our developers had to design a number of special 'widgets' to allow us to recreate some of the functionality of the Australian site.

Once the English language version of the site was finished, Phoslock Europe reached out to colleagues and partners around the world and commissioned translations of the content in 10 additional languages.

Island Web Design provided a 'flat document' for each page containing the headers, sub headers and body text for each page as well as thee links, button text, SEO content, URL and page title & description. As the translated content was fed back to us, we created a copy of the entire site for each language in turn, and replaced the English text with the translated text, subsequently hosting the translated copy in a subfolder.

The beauty of the system we use is that anyone can go from any page to the any one of the 10 translated versions of that page. In other words, the language selector does not just take you to the home page of the language each time, instead it keeps you on whichever page you happen to be.

Because of the size of the original English version of the site (over 25 pages), the completed site now consists of over 275 pages, making this the biggest site we have produced to date.