Major Scandinavian Trucking Transport company [Edit: Major update]

• Visit website: www.aholatransport.com

Ahola Transport is a successful Scandinavian trucking transportation company which has more than three-doubled during the last decade, expanding first to the Baltic states, and is today offering trucking transportation door-to-door in the continental Europe, with a capacity around 300 trailers.

Ahola Transport has a unique concept without fixed routes or terminals, which enables continuous optimization of the routes by Ahola's staff, aided by the company's self-developed, concept based IT-system. This way of working has resulted in efficient, reliable and environmentally friendly transports.

Drupal Website

In order to reach out to it's new, very multilingual, market (the EU), Ahola needed a CMS capable of handling multiple languages, and behaving well with search engines. These requirements were more than well met by Drupal. We at RIL Partner were responsible for the whole project, from a slight refresh of the design, to transfering content from the old website, the Drupal implementation and SEO.

Multilingual requirements

Ahola's register of contact persons makes quite a number of nodes (each person is a node), and would be a nightmare to maintain if every contact person had to be available in localized versions. Problems like these were solved (as usual) by delving into Drupal's large amount of contributed modules. The "Language sections" module solved this particular problem, by enabling multiple language versions of free text within one single node. CCK Field labels a.s.o. were as usual taken care of by the multilingual system.

SEO

Search engine optimization has been done using following modules, trying to make the information showed by Drupal being as relevant as possible to the content of the page: Meta tags, Menu breadcrumb, Page Title.

For notifying search engines, we have unfortunately not been able to get the XML Sitemap module working, and needed to instead create a manual list of URL:s, with the help of the urllist module. (It doesn't support internationalization well, so we had to edit the list manually first.)

Other useful modules

We've been very happy with the Tiny tiny MCE module, which just works, as opposed to other TinyMCE integration modules we've tried.

Samuel Lampa
RIL Partner AB - Drupal and Mediawiki webdesign

[EDIT 2009-06-27: The website has now gone through a major update]