Mink Bautransporte, Kuppenheim: 100 years of haulage, a site in three languages

The aim was a site that picks up the colours of the lorries – ivory, burgundy and black – and shows site managers at a glance what is hauled, with which vehicle and how an enquiry works. On top came three languages, an enquiry form without third-party services and a company history with archive photos. Concept, design, copy editing and programming came from us; the photos were supplied by the client and prepared for the web by us.

The design concept is called “Bautafel und Baken” (site board and marker posts): the website reads like the information board at a building site. Facts sit in board rows with a label and a value, sections are divided by marker-post stripes in burgundy and ivory, and the colours come from the vehicle paintwork. The site is set in Barlow Condensed for signs and headings and Barlow for body text, both served as woff2 (a compressed web font format) from the site's own server. The centrepiece of the home page is a fleet showcase with 19 vehicle photos: swipe, browse with the arrow keys or click to open the enlarged view (lightbox). On the company page a black-and-white archive photo fades into a present-day one; below follow a timeline with eleven milestones from 1924 to 2026 and a company archive with 13 historical pictures.

All 27 pages – nine each in German, French and English – live as fixed content in the theme, which creates the pages itself on activation. The theme handles languages, the form and search engine data without a plugin: a language switcher with flags, hreflang (references that let search engines show the right language version) and 301 redirects (permanent redirects) from the old addresses are part of it. All interaction – menu, showcase, lightbox, form validation – sits in a single script without libraries. Photos are delivered as WebP (a modern, compact image format), mostly in two sizes, the hero image with priority, those further down only when scrolled into view. On the client's photos we blurred number plates and faces, and we retouched the archive pictures, extracting some from a scan.

The site needs no cookie banner: it sets no cookies for visitors and loads nothing from third-party servers on page load; instead of an embedded map, a link leads to route planning. The enquiry form asks for service, material, quantity and date and protects itself without a captcha service: with a one-time token (a verification key that is valid only once), invisible decoy fields only machines fill in, a content check and limits per sender. The home pages carry structured data (JSON-LD, a machine-readable data block in the source code) on the local business, its service area and areas of expertise. A skip link to the content, a keyboard-operable showcase and lightbox, respect for “reduce motion” and Windows high-contrast mode, and a switch that stops the moving marker stripes are part of the basic build.