New website for Eternit (Schweiz) AG, the leading manufacturer of cement composite for cladding facades and roofs
Challenge
Recreate the vast corporate website as part of a comprehensive rebranding effort. Lead with vision and determination by Eternit’s relentless head of architecture and communications Christine Dietrich, concept, content und layout were re-developed from scratch.
In close collaboration with the client, the highly talented Toma Perret of /DEPARTMENT developed the new corporate design and, in several iterations that tested his unflappabilty, the layout of the website.
The elegant, light and timeless design with an unobtrusive  ‘swiss feel’ is aimed at architects, construction professionals and house owners.
I was entrusted with the technical realization and the motion design.
Selected Pages
- at the heart of the site is the comprehensive product catalogue – click arrow buttons to browse
- architecture and culture history – drag the timeline-slider
- various tools, for instance the trader finder – enter a swiss postal code, e.g. 8000
- reference library with advanced filter options and geographical mapping
Some pages that demnonstrate the unlimited flexibility of the layout:  News Section, Magazine, Download Center, Training
Technical Info
- fully responsive
- supports legacy browsers including IE8 (the nemesis of every web developer).
- to ensure a maximum of creative freedom and ease of updating the multilingual site, Â we developed a fully customized Single Page Application (SPA) based on Backbone and Foundation. CMS functionality: client edits the quite vast data driven parts of the site in Excel-Files which are then converted to JSON.
- Node and Grunt for optimized module loading and file compression,  GitHub for version management, Trello and Campfire for communication, seo4ajax to create static ‘snapshots’ to feed the search engine robots.
Acknowledgements
I wish to express my gratitude to Daniel Hauri for the recommendation, Rouven Hauri for his support in the initial phase of the project and Martin Hofer for the patient technical support.
Big kudos to Janine L̦pfe Рher energetic and swift execution was decisive for the launch of the website, the speed with which she mastered the custom CMS was astounding and made handing over the project to the client a breeze.
Special thanks to Christine Dietrich for her unwavering trust.
