GMV's corporate website: multi-region, multilingual and built for the demands of the aerospace and defence sector

GMV is a privately owned technology group founded in 1984 that designs and develops systems for ten high-technology sectors: space, aeronautics, defence and security, cybersecurity, intelligent transport systems, automotive, healthcare, industry, digital public services and banking. It's responsible, for example, for the ground control segment of Galileo, Europe's satellite navigation system. It has offices in 12 countries, clients in close to 80, and three quarters of its revenue comes from outside Spain, and its corporate website is the showcase of all that for clients, agencies, partners and candidates across half the world. In 2018 GMV put the renewal of that website out to tender, and we won it.

GMV's previous website had fallen short for a company operating in so many markets and with so many audiences. Its communications team knew exactly what it needed: a content management system that would let it add languages without depending on a developer, publish each language separately without waiting for every translation to be ready, manage editing, translation, approval and publishing workflows across several roles, capture applications and contacts in a database, match vacancies to profiles, and integrate with its CRM and marketing platforms. And, above all, a website that wasn't just multilingual but multi-region: one where each market, starting with Spain, Portugal and Poland, could show its own content tree in its own languages, with English as the group's common language.

On top of that comes what the sector demands. A group working in defence, space and cybersecurity, with its software development process maturity certified at the highest CMMI level, asks the same of its corporate website as of its systems: performance, robustness and, especially, security. And a considerable volume of content: news, events, press releases, vacancies, products and projects being published and translated non-stop.

The brief was to build a single platform that served all those regions, languages and audiences coherently, that the team could manage with full autonomy, and that matched the technical demands of an engineering company.

We started with conceptualisation: we gathered requirements with GMV's communications team, defined the information architecture accounting not just for content but for the audiences and regions it comes from, and put together the content plan, the navigation, the wireframes for every template on desktop and mobile, and the interaction spec. In design we worked on two graphic directions, GMV chose one and we developed it into the full visual system, newsletter templates included.

In development we built the website on Drupal in a single installation that serves the different regions and their languages, with English running across all of them, and that lets each region adapt its own content tree. The CMS includes editing, translation, approval and publishing workflows by role, a shared media library, reusable content blocks the team uses to compose each page, a faceted search engine, the contact and application forms, the careers section with related vacancies, and the integrations with the email marketing platform, the corporate blog and the translation service, which receives and returns batches of content automatically. We imported the news and events archive, loaded the content in the launch languages, optimised performance and deployed the website on GMV's infrastructure. We delivered everything the proposal set out: every deliverable and every feature.

And since launch, in September 2021, we've carried on with support: developments through a bank of hours, technical maintenance, bug fixes, support for the team, and the migrations to the following versions of Drupal.