The brief

Following the acquisition of Sparrows by Altrad Group, the company’s website required an update to reflect the rebrand to Altrad Sparrows. Having designed and built the existing website, Designtastic was tasked with giving the website a fresh new look and feel. We retained the existing content and functionality because it was more cost-effective for the client than a complete redesign and re-build.

Our solution

We scoped out the rebrand changes to the existing website in desktop and mobile modes page by page, updating all the brand elements so that the site now adheres to Altrad’s brand guidelines: logos, colours, fonts, images and terminology.

We took the opportunity to improve page load speeds by replacing png icons with vectors, and jpegs with webp files, a format developed by Google to reduce the size of images. The website’s existing Content Management System (CMS), Craft, was also updated.

With all this in place, we then applied the templates to a new site for Altrad Alpha, an Altrad Sparrows company that was also rebranded.

Both sites required new domain names to fit with the change of company names. From an SEO (search engine optimisation) standpoint, we minimised the loss of hard-earned SERP (search engine results page) rankings by updating old content, adjusting hyperlinks, setting up redirects, initiating a change of address on Google search console, publishing rebrand announcement content and planned post-rebrand content to support new keyword targets.

The results

Following extensive cross-browser testing of the new website front-ends, we launched altradsparrows.com and altradalpha.com on schedule and perfectly in sync with the announcement of the launch of the company rebrands – testament to great planning and project management by the in-house and Designtastic rebrand team.