A bilingual website for a mining services company

The challenge

Global Network Systems DRC has served mining companies in the Democratic Republic of Congo since 2009: mineral processing, mining construction, electricity, logistics and certified training. Its clients include Kamoa, Kamoto Copper Company and Metalkol.

Its website dated from 2019 and ran on an ageing framework. It had to present the company to mining clients in both French and English, keep the old addresses working, and receive enquiries safely. It also had to run on shared cPanel hosting without SSH access.

Our approach

We rebuilt the site on Zana with two modules: Site, for the company pages, and Contact, for the enquiry form.

• Every page exists under /fr and /en. A visitor arriving at the root is sent to the language their browser asks for, or French by default.
• The 2019 addresses (/home, /about, /services, /products, /contact) redirect to their new pages, so links and search rankings carry over.
• The contact form uses stateless CSRF tokens, anti-spam checks and rate limiting, and sends its mail from the company's existing mailbox.
• Security headers, branded error pages, a sitemap and structured data are built in, and a startup guard refuses unsafe production settings.
• Images are served as AVIF and WebP with JPEG fallbacks.
• Only public/ is served. On hosting without SSH, the code sits beside public_html, and a release script builds the two upload archives.