Harrer & Partner
Harrer & Partner are long-standing clients of mine and up until now I have developed and maintained their inhouse project Mail & Deploy.
The company website hpartner.at has become outdated over the years and was not up to date anymore – from a (design-)technical point of view – compared to mail-and-deploy.com. Also the maintenance and the content management was apparently very tedious and simply outdated compared to WordPress. That’s why the idea of a complete website relaunch based on WordPress was born for the company’s 20th anniversary.
As we have a good business relationship and have always worked well together, I was kindly asked to come up with a concept and design and to take care of the technical realization.
Extracting the existing content, including all news articles, was a challenge because the old CMS did not provide any export options.
I therefore had to carry out semi-automated web scraping, transfer the content and metadata to an Excel file and finally migrate it to WordPress using a self-developed importer.
Eventually, manual reworking was necessary because some HTML tags and inline styles were no longer needed in the Gutenberg editor. Overall, however, the migration worked quite well and I was very happy with the result.
As a ‘Plan B’ we’ve agreed that only selected news articles would be migrated manually, but that would have been unsatisfactory for me because dead links are a no-go from an SEO perspective.
I have once again broken new ground with some technical implementations and of course I again relied on the Interactivity API, which is integrated in the current WordPress version.
All in all, Harrer & Partner should be happy with the new website for many years.