Bolckmans

Bolckmans NV builds industrial and utility halls out of Hoogstraten, with a team of around 130. Its site has to do what a brochure never could: let someone planning a building find the one that already looks like theirs, and then meet the customers who would vouch for the firm that put it up. I was its developer for two years and four months.

Sections cut on the diagonal

The design does not stack rectangles. Photographs are sliced on a diagonal, red banner headings sit half on the image and half off it, and the text column lands in the gap the slice leaves behind. It is the part of the site I would point at first.

Building that as a theme rather than as a set of hand-made pages is the whole trick. Every one of those blocks is a paragraph type an editor fills in, so the slice, the banner overlap and the column split have to hold with a two-word heading and with a forty-word one, at every width, without anybody tuning a page by hand.

Narrowing a catalogue of buildings

Someone planning a warehouse does not want to scroll two hundred projects. They want the ones in their province, in the construction method they are considering, of roughly their type — and they want to see where those actually are. The catalogue is a React front end over the Drupal content, with a map, a reset, and three filters.

The decision worth naming is a boolean one. Ticking two filters had been widening the results when everyone ticking them expected the opposite, so the join changed from OR to AND. That filter is a shared component I maintained across several of the agency’s client sites, which meant the correction shipped everywhere it ran, not only here.

Testimonials without a developer in the loop

A construction firm’s strongest argument is a customer making it on the firm’s behalf. Testimonials became something Bolckmans’ own people manage: a configuration page where a quote is written once, given its own fields, and then attached to the project page it belongs to.

I took the unglamorous half of that too — who may duplicate content, who may open an account at all, and keeping the module tree small enough to stay patchable. Over the years more modules came out than went in, which on a site that has to survive its own maintenance is the same kind of work.