A German and English site a lighting studio can edit itself

The studio’s German and English menus kept drifting apart, and the team that edits the site couldn’t tell where to fix them. On this kind of WordPress block theme a menu block copies the menu once and never updates it. With two languages, the two menus slowly went different ways.

I built the home page on a test copy: full-screen sections, arrows between them and a small anchor menu. It adapts to screen height as well as width. Text is left-aligned on tablets and centred on phones, to suit long German words.

Then I installed WPML, translated the home page and listed the menus and template parts still waiting for translation.

Menus the studio edits itself

I moved every menu (main, projects, footer, social) to standard WordPress menus for both languages and placed them in the templates with a small custom shortcode. Now the studio edits them in the usual menu screen. Client and project pages got extra fields with default text, so the published pages stayed intact, and I checked them in both languages. On mobile the cards go full width.

I recorded short videos on menus, templates, translations and the English contact form, so the studio needs no developer for these. In 2026, after a full backup, I added a team photo to the contact page, compressed to 354 KB and checked at five screen sizes. I removed a testimonial from two English pages and checked every page in both languages for other copies.

In September 2026 the shortcode menus, the new team photo and the updated testimonial slider were all live.