Louvretec

Louvretec's existing website no longer reflected the quality of the products it represented. Working with Rebecca King and Bill at Louvretec, Koda Web identified a set of core problems the redevelopment needed to solve:

• An outdated design and user experience that didn't engage visitors or build confidence in the brand
• No easy way for a homeowner to visualise Louvretec products in a real setting before buying
• Two very different audiences — homeowners and architects/specifiers — being served the same generic experience <
•  No simple way for customers to find their nearest dealer
• Technical documentation that was difficult to organise and, in places, needed to be restricted to trade professionals only
• A site that wasn't optimised for mobile devices or for search engines
• A requirement to eventually stand up a matching website for the Australian business without rebuilding from scratch

Koda Web partnered with Louvretec through a collaborative design phase and delivered a fully custom, responsive website with several purpose-built features:

Refreshed, role-aware design

• A custom UX/UI designed around navigation and usability, tested against both mobile and desktop interaction patterns
• A simple entry-point selector lets visitors identify as a homeowner or as an architect/specifier, with their choice remembered in a session cookie so the right content is shown on return visits — no login required

Louvretec Product Viewer

• An interactive viewer lets site visitors place Louvretec products into predefined real-world settings, choosing product type, colour and add-ons such as side awnings and lighting, and switching between day and night views
• Selections swap in with a smooth transition, giving visitors a genuine sense of how a product will look in their own space

Dealer locator

• A geo-located map surfaces the nearest dealers and branches to each visitor, with each pin linking through to a detailed dealer landing page

Gated technical library

• Architects and specifiers can log in to access and download technical documents that are kept secure from general public access, while product-specific documents remain available from their relevant product pages

Content the Louvretec team can own

• A full Drupal content management system gives Louvretec's own staff control over pages, menus, images and content blocks, backed by training so the team can maintain the site independently

A repeatable platform for Australia

• Once the New Zealand site was complete, Koda cloned the platform to stand up the Australian website — re-themed, re-populated with AU-specific dealers, content and imagery, and configured with its own SEO foundations — without rebuilding the underlying site

The result is a website that works as hard as Louvretec's products do. Homeowners get an engaging, visual way to explore what's possible for their home; architects and specifiers get fast access to the technical detail they need; and Louvretec's team has a modern, maintainable platform they can grow without being tied to a licensing model or a single market. The same platform now underpins both the New Zealand and Australian businesses, and existing search visibility was protected through carefully applied redirects at go-live, so the new site launched without losing the ground already gained in search rankings.

Koda Web builds on Drupal, an open-source content management system also used by organisations such as Tesla and Harvard University, rather than WordPress. For a business like Louvretec — trading across two countries with a mix of public and gated content — that choice mattered in three areas:

Security

Drupal's architecture and release processes are built around enterprise-grade security, backed by a global community of more than 100,000 developers who actively identify and patch vulnerabilities. This matters for Louvretec's gated technical document library, where access needs to be reliably restricted to logged-in architects and specifiers rather than exposed publicly.

Performance

As a database-driven CMS, Drupal lets Louvretec update branding, theming and content over time without re-engineering the site, while content stored centrally can be reused cleanly across pages, products and the cloned Australian site. Koda also recommended a CDN (Cloudflare) to keep page load times fast for visitors in both markets.

SEO

The site was built to SEO best practice from the ground up — friendly URLs, H1 tags mapped to relevant keywords, configurable meta data, and an XML sitemap submitted to search engines alongside Google Analytics and Search Console. Because Louvretec had existing (if modest) search visibility, Koda applied 301 redirects from every old indexed page to its new equivalent at go-live, ensuring that value wasn't lost in the transition.

And because Drupal is open source, Louvretec owns the finished platform outright — no ongoing licence fees, and the freedom to keep building on it as the business grows.