The blog ·
Agence Chabanne: a doubly successful website migration
The Lyon-based architectural firm Chabanne has entrusted us with the migration of its website on two occasions
Chabanne is one of the heavyweights of French architecture. Based in Lyon, this firm, which handles international contracts, was an early innovator in integrating building engineering disciplines. Always at the cutting edge, it has updated its visual identity and is now promoting BIM (Building Information Modelling).
Should they change their website provider?
In 2016, the firm had a website built by SQLI. Whilst the design fully met their expectations, the management at Chabanne Architecte noted that the site was slow and lacked organic search visibility. Their IT department asked us to carry out an audit.
It soon became clear that the problems stemmed from the site’s technical design and the quality of the hosting: a lack of optimisation, cascading style sheets and JavaScript files piling up, SEO-essential tags either missing or duplicated, and extremely slow hosting.
Management therefore decided to switch providers for its internet services: website, hosting and domain name management. AmaZili was tasked with overseeing the transition.
Changing everything without altering the site’s appearance
The communications department set us a challenge: to change the site’s engine without altering its appearance, whilst improving its performance and organic search engine optimisation.
We retrieved the website files and its database, and developed a reverse-engineering method to migrate the entire site to one built on MODX, a CMS we have been using for many years. This method enabled us to migrate a site built on SQLI’s CMS.
It will take us five months of work to complete the new website, but it’s well worth the effort: it scores 100 per cent in Google’s tests.
SEO is following suit, as we’ve taken advantage of this technical overhaul to add the tags that inform search engines about the content of each page (titles, descriptions, image alt text, etc.).
2019: new logo, new brand identity, new domain name
In early 2019, in the strictest confidence, the communications department summoned us: Chabanne Architecte was to be replaced by Agence Chabanne. A new domain name, a new brand identity, a new logo: everything had to be ready in the strictest confidence, as the announcement was to be made to staff at a seminar in April.
Mission accomplished: the website now features the new Chabanne Archi Ingé logo, presented in a range of colours depending on the page, and its SEO has been preserved thanks to 301 redirects that send every old URL to the new one.
Need your website taken over or migrated?
A slow website, a service provider who’s no longer responding, a name change: we take over existing websites without losing their search engine rankings. See our pages on website takeovers and maintenance, and website redesign and migration.