The challenge
A group of scientific instrument manufacturers, each trading under its own brand with its own products, its own specialist audience and its own website. Ten of them.
Consolidating ten brands into one site was never the aim — the brands are the point, and the buyers of one are not the buyers of another. The problem is the other end of it. Ten websites built at different times, several by us and the rest inherited, is ten platforms to keep patched, ten sets of backups to actually be running, and ten things that can go quietly out of date.
That is usually where estates like this come apart: not in a dramatic failure, but in a site nobody has updated in two years because it was never clear whose job it was.
What we do
- Host all ten sites on infrastructure we manage, rather than ten arrangements with different providers.
- Monitoring, backups and certificate renewal running across the whole estate.
- Platform and security patching, applied as maintenance rather than when something breaks.
- Development and changes on every site — including the ones we did not originally build.
- One team with the whole estate in view, so knowledge is not stranded per site.
The outcome
Why it is worth saying
Most case studies describe a build and stop at launch. The majority of a website's life is what happens afterwards, and taking on sites somebody else wrote is a different skill to writing them — you inherit decisions you would not have made, and the job is to keep them running regardless.