A website and back office the client runs alone

The challenge

Mining Multiservices Company provides services to the mining industry: civil engineering and rehabilitation, computing and telecommunications, cleaning and laundry, plant maintenance, equipment supply and training.

Its website was a single template page. Almost everything on it was placeholder material: Lorem Ipsum descriptions, invented statistics, demo client logos, a placeholder video. It had no French version, no meta description, no sitemap and no security headers. MMC needed a real site, and a way to fill it with its own content as that content became available.

Our approach

We started by auditing the old site and the framework, then built on Zana with four modules: Site, Content, Contact and Administration.

• Built to look right with little content. A section with nothing published leaves the navigation, so the site never shows an empty page or a fake one.
• One content engine for six types: pages, services, projects, news, team and testimonials, each in its own tables. They are edited in Markdown with a toolbar, signed previews and revision history with restore.
• Each language published on its own. A missing translation never falls back to the other language, and the language switcher only leads to pages that exist.
• Roles that match the company: editors write drafts, publishers put them live. Sign-in has attempt limits, invitations are single-use, and sign-ins and resets are kept in a security log.
• A media library that re-encodes uploads, keeps originals private and requires a description in each language.
• A protected contact form. Every enquiry is stored before any mail is sent, the sender gets an acknowledgement in their language, and the inbox shows any mail failure. Enquiries are deleted after 12 months.
• Search and speed built in: canonical URLs, hreflang, structured data, a sitemap, robots.txt, a news feed per language, redirects from the old addresses, and a page cache refreshed whenever content changes.
• Deployed without SSH, from release archives, with migrations run by a scheduled task.