Here’s the UK site in the early 2000’s. You can view the current site here.
Saint-Gobain are a French-headquartered global materials company, with around 170,000 employees at the time of acquiring NE Technology Ltd in the late 1990s.
Having recently created NE Technology’s first website, Daren joined Saint-Gobain’s global web team, developing web strategies and tools but also ensuring the representation of his local business within Saint-Gobain.com. In 2000, NE Technology Ltd became Saint-Gobain Crystals and Detectors Ltd and Daren set to work on local rebranding and on migrating and incorporating content into Saint-Gobain.com. NE’s product portfolio was large and the technical documentation extensive, so this was no trivial task.
When a smaller business is acquired by a much larger one, the small business’s offering can struggle to be well-represented or even found in the new owner’s website.
One of Daren’s roles within the global web team was to negotiate proper representation for the local business in the .com site’s structure, and also to manage vital keywords and other meta information to aid search engines in finding the right content.