Internationally Consistent and Scalable Brand Websites for Engelhard

From Pharmacy to Global Player

Today, Engelhard Arzneimittel sells well-known products such as Prospan, Velgastin, Tyrosur, Sinolpan, isla, and Esprico in numerous markets worldwide: velgastin.com / prospan.de / prospan.at / tyrosur.de / sinolpan.de / isla.de / isla.at / esprico.de.
As the company grew and its brands became more international, a heterogeneous network of individual product websites in different languages emerged over the years—each with its own structure, design, and CMS. This led to inconsistencies in brand image, high maintenance costs, and technical redundancies.

The Challenge: Creating Unity—Worldwide

The Engelhard team’s goal was to standardize its global brand presence without sacrificing the flexibility needed to meet local requirements. 

Deciding on the Right CMS and the Right Agency

In order to combine global consistency and local customization, Engelhard quickly decided on TYPO3—the content management system (CMS) that can map all international brand websites under a common code base—without having to compromise on flexibility.

Engelhard also appreciated TYPO3’s open, expandable architecture, its multilingual and multisite capabilities, and the high security and stability of the CMS.

In their search for TYPO3 experts, the Engelhard team followed a recommendation for b13. The decision to go with TYPO3 and b13 as their implementation partner soon paid off—not only on a technical level, but also on a personal level.

The B13 Approach: Proactive, Pragmatic, and Budget-Friendly

The collaboration with b13 was characterized by clear communication on equal terms, creative solutions, clarifying questions, and quick feedback. b13 ensured that the existing design was not only implemented but also redesigned in a targeted manner.

Implementation: Scalable, Efficient, SEO-friendly

After an intensive design phase, b13 developed a master extension as a common code base and site extensions for each brand. This concept makes it possible to reuse central components while allowing for customization at the brand level—an approach that significantly reduces the integration costs for new country sites.

The first brand website, Velgastin, was launched in early 2021. Since then, additional brands have been continuously integrated and existing sites have been relaunched based on the system.

The structured development of a content element catalog, UX optimizations, and hreflang implementation contributed significantly to the successful outcome.

Global Consistency and Local Autonomy

A challenge for Engelhard, as a manufacturer of pharmaceuticals and medical devices, is the fact that the same products are sold under different names in different countries, requiring varying legal requirements at country level (e.g., with regard to warning labels, additional identification requirements, etc.). The goal was to integrate these individual requirements while maintaining a consistent brand image. To ensure this, b13 developed a standardized catalog of page types, content elements, and features that ensures visual and structural consistency within individual brands, but also across all brands.
Due to differing content requirements, it was clear from the outset that simply translating pages within a page tree would not meet the requirements. The websites had to be independently translatable for each country (Austria, for example, requires an independent English translation of the content that does not correspond 100% to the English translation of the German website). In order to be able to represent these country-specific requirements, the implementation for each country website was therefore based on a separate root page for each country (e.g., DE and AT root pages for Germany and Austria). Each root page can thus be translated into other languages independently of each other, but is based on a common code base. New elements or features can thus be developed for the German website, for example, but can also be used for the Austrian website without generating additional effort and costs.

Integration into other brand websites is therefore also possible without any problems, quickly and cost-effectively.

B13’s SEO-Oriented Approach

Avoiding duplicate content by using hreflang tags

The standardization of websites across national borders was not only carried out on a visual level, but also in terms of content. The aim was and is to ensure that the messages within a brand are consistent across all websites, thereby conveying a consistent brand language. While this creates synergies at editorial level, as content only needs to be created once and can be used on all country sites, it leads to challenges at the technical level: duplicate content!
Since this was already clear during the initial planning stage, b13 designed and developed a solution for linking pages in different root pages using hreflang tags.

The linking of pages can be edited by editors in the backend, thereby guaranteeing that the relationship between language and country versions is always up to date, even when new content is published.

Prospects for Success—How Engelhard Views the Results

The new platform enables Engelhard to integrate and publish future brands and countries at a significantly faster pace. This means that a new product website for a country can be set up and published within a matter of days. There is no need for a complex conception, design, and implementation process, due to the existing shared foundation.
Engelhard also expects noticeable improvements in website usage due to better content and enhanced SEO.