The Wuppermann Group is a medium-sized family business based in Leverkusen that has been active in steel processing since 1872. The company’s product portfolio includes surface-finished flat products, tubes, and tube components made of steel for mechanical engineering and various other industries such as the solar industry or road construction. The Leverkusen-based company produces approximately one million tons of galvanized steel strip per year and currently operates five production sites with more than 800 employees.

The navigation structure and appearance of the previous website no longer did justice to the high-quality content. The central requirement was an optimized structure in contemporary design, enabling users to navigate to the desired products and contacts easily and with just a few clicks—in multiple languages and country versions. Functionalities such as a CO₂ calculator and a coil calculator for calculating steel coil parameters were to be integrated into the site. Additionally, the client wanted the site to be maintained and updated in-house as easily as possible.

Together with the client, we defined goals, requirements, and strategy for the relaunch in several workshops. In the next step, we designed the information architecture and navigation structure for the product and shareholder sections. We visualized the most important page templates for the client using wireframes. Based on a low-fidelity prototype, where the focus was initially more on functionality than design, we developed the navigation concept and user flow for the entire website. Important SEO aspects such as fast loading times, mobile optimization, and GDPR compliance were at the top of the to-do list. We brought the design into a modern look and feel, selecting an elegant dark blue as the background color with green as an accent color, which we adopted from the company’s key visual.

The new Wuppermann website is both aesthetically pleasing and functional with intuitive user guidance, making it an important factor for SEO. A streamlined and focused menu provides a quick overview of the website’s offerings: information about the company, direct access to all products and contacts, helpful information for the most important target industries, and separate communication with shareholders through a login area integrated into the website.

The entry point guides users to their destination with just a few clicks via both product and industry pages. User guidance for the most important content on a page is provided through call-to-action buttons in the above-the-fold area at the top of the page, allowing users to immediately jump to the most important content further down.

The modular structure of the site provides creative freedom: using a modular system of various design components, the Wuppermann team can independently create individual, dynamic pages.

Special highlight: In June 2022, the website was named “Website of the Week” by CMS provider Processwire. Read the case study here.