About

Polypipe is one of Europe’s largest plastics manufacturers with a product range comprising of piping products and sanitary systems. Producing over 350 million meters of pipe each year, Polypipe are recognized as the UK number one plastic pipe systems brand. The Polypipe group comprises of 22 manufacturing and operational sites across 14 companies with over 2800 employees across Europe and China.

Brief

CTI Support network were asked by Marketing Agency Monitor Creative to develop a new Polypipe website to replace the existing group website and the individual websites for each subsidiary company within the group. The new website was to replace the existing group site and subsidiary company sites with a product that maintained the individuality of each company whilst giving a consistent design across the group. This would ensure that all sites met the core objectives of Polypipe and then all the contents and services of each company could be found easily and quickly while still meeting accessibility regulations

Solution

The solution was implemented by means of a main group site that contains individual sections for each company. As well as displaying an online version of the companies’ product catalogue, the site contains information about the company, their manufacturing process and information about environmental policy. Brochures and documentation can also be downloaded or requests can be made for printed copies via the website.

Polypipe has a product range of 20,000 products across the 22 products within the group and the new site contains each product including a product image, specification and PDF document where appropriate. The products are navigable via a hierarchical category structure as well as a group wide product search facility. Polypipe have the ability to manage their online product range via the CMS including the facility to add / edit product categories as well as creating new products and uploading product images. Each subsidiary site has news and project pages that display articles that are specific to the company. Each company has the facility to create their own news stories and add an accompanying photo via the CMS. The main group news and projects page contain articles relating to the group along with a selection of articles from subsidiary companies which are editable via the CMS.

The site contains a secure password protected area which allows investors to download financial reports. Polypipe have the ability to edit the list of files on the financial page via the CMS. The security is implemented by means of a role based system that can be controlled via the CMS, allowing Polypipe to create new users and apply login validation to any aspect of the site. The same security model used for the financial area is applied to the CMS to prevent unauthorized editing. The role based system provides the facility for users from a subsidiary company to edit their own companies entities but not those of other companies whilst the administrators for the group site have full access to group wide entities.