A manufacturing group's WordPress sites: new sections, a dealer finder

The client is an international manufacturing group with several brands, selling through a dealer network. In 2024 a German web agency brought me in on two of the group’s sites, both built by other developers: the corporate site, with a custom WordPress theme and its own page builder, and the script behind a separate dealer-finder site. In both I kept what worked and changed only what the task needed. The dealer finder came first, in January 2024, and the group came back with the next job in September.

Projects

1. 2024

   Dealer finder script rewrite, with tooltips in three languages

   I rewrote the script behind the group’s dealer finder, adding tooltips in German, English and Italian and a third service icon.

   I kept the existing keyword detection and rebuilt the file around it, with one function that builds each icon and its tooltip. The tooltip language comes from the page address, German by default. The hover highlight and the animated tooltips get their styles after page load, so they don’t hold up the first view. I added the third icon and documented the script for the next developer. On request I changed the tooltip colour and one label, and checked the new icon on a real dealer entry.

   I delivered it in January 2024. In September 2026 the rewritten script still runs on the dealer site, and every icon explains itself in three languages.

   Stack: WordPress, JavaScript, CSS

2. 2024

   New page-builder sections and a careers page for a corporate WordPress site

   I added three new sections to the group’s custom page builder (a slider, cards and an FAQ) and reworked the careers page so it leads visitors to the job listings.

   A copy of the live site would not import. So I set up a clean test site with the same theme and plugins, and proved there that the new fields do no harm before any live change.

   The slider has arrows, a progress menu and synced dots. The cards come in five variants, with hover text on desktop and tablet and the text always visible on a phone. The FAQ is plain HTML and CSS with no JavaScript. Each section loads its styles and scripts only on the pages that use it, so the main stylesheet did not grow.

   Some card sections showed twice or not at all. I fixed that with a small guard in the card template and left the builder’s own loop logic alone. On a live test page the sections did not render, and the reason was a server setting for short PHP tags, so I proposed full tags for the three files.

   On the careers page I lined the job board up with the other sections and added a CSS-only button that scrolls to it. For Safari on iPhone I moved the button icon from an icon font to an image. The height of the job board, embedded from another domain, can’t be read from the page, so I gave the agency the options.

   The sections and the careers page changes went live in September and October 2024. In September 2026 the careers page is built from the card and FAQ sections and keeps its scroll button, and the home page loads none of their files.

   Stack: WordPress, PHP, ACF, JavaScript, CSS