The Netherlocks Safety Systems website

After I had built a website for Alicat, a Halma company, I was approached by another Halma company, Netherlocks Safety Systems, to help update their website.

I can’t link to the website as Netherlocks and Smith Flow Control merged and they now have a new website as Sofis, which I didn’t build.

Development

This was a bit different. I was contacted by Sander Peeters, Netherlocks’ Marketing Coordinator, to help with a new website.

The previous Netherlocks website was very basic. It was laid out using tables, was not responsive on different devices, was dark, unattractive and did not do a good job of representing the company.

Sander had already created a WordPress installation and he had found a theme that he quite liked for the new website. However, he told me he wanted to make quite a lot of customisations to it.

The build

Rather than start with the purchased theme and then create a child theme to make changes to it, which can be really annoying and difficult depending on how well the original theme has been built, I built my own. That way it is all my code.

I quickly built something that looked similar in feel to what Sander wanted but it used a lot less code and loaded a lot faster. As I had built it, I would have complete control when it came to the customisations.

And there were a lot.

Working with Netherlocks

After the basic site was built, Sander started sending me his customisation ideas.

I am not a big fan of sliding headers (carousels). You should never use them. But they were a fad at the time and Netherlocks wanted one that showed the latest news posts with a semi-opaque background over the featured image for the story. And they wanted a white bar to cover the top left corner to match the branding. That was pretty easy.

Then they wanted four feature boxes that were each colour coded and shape coded to match the logo and the four areas of the business.

The colour coding was also introduced when showing the latest posts on the Home page. Each news post was categorised to one of the four aspects of the business. When a story was used on the Home page a semi-opaque coloured bar matching the sector’s colour would be placed over the featured image.

Reception

The website was put to the Netherlocks board. They also had quite a few changes but they were simple to implement. It was well received. So much so that Netherlocks’ sister company Smith Flow Control asked if I would make a website for them.