IPAC

Challenge

IPAC (International Petroleum Products and Additives Company) develops and manufactures additive packages for lubricants: automotive, heavy duty, industrial, driveline, and fuel. It’s headquartered in San Ramon, California, with manufacturing in Illinois, Louisiana, Texas, California, Belgium, and Singapore.

Its website is how formulators and buyers find the right product and get the technical paperwork behind it. Product pages are public, but the specification sheets and handling documents behind them are for signed-in customers only.

That site ran on custom PHP code that left IPAC’s team limited in what they could change themselves. Adding a product, posting news, or updating a document meant asking someone else to do it. The site worked, but IPAC wanted hands-on control of it.

Approach

Move the platform, not the brand. This was a lift-and-shift. cre8 rebuilt the templates in WordPress to match the existing look and page structure, so customers who knew the old site found their way around the new one. A redesign can come later, on a foundation IPAC controls.

Keep the gate on the documents. Each product and product-type page can hold multiple technical PDFs. Visitors who aren’t signed in see the product and a prompt to log in; signed-in customers see the documents. IPAC staff manage customer accounts and upload documents themselves, with separate roles for customers, internal editors, and administrators.

Don’t break the old addresses. Product, category, and news URLs from the old site redirect to their matching pages, so bookmarks, inbound links, and search listings land on the right page.

Carry the essentials across. The contact form, a site-wide Google Translate widget for international buyers, baseline search settings, and IPAC’s news archive all came over in the same move.

Then keep going. After launch, cre8 moved the site behind Cloudflare for security and performance, set up Google Analytics, and stayed on to maintain it. cre8 also shipped a new calculator inside QuickBlend, IPAC’s lubricant formulation web application, with reference values IPAC’s team can adjust without a new software release.

Outcome

• IPAC’s site is on WordPress, with the original look carried across and its gated technical library intact.
• IPAC’s own team now manages the site end to end: products, documents, news, page content, and customer logins, without waiting on a developer.
• Old product and news addresses redirect to their new pages, so links that were already out in the world still work.
• The site now runs behind Cloudflare, with analytics in place to show which visits turn into inquiries.
• The same team that rebuilt the site extended QuickBlend, IPAC’s formulation tool, with a new calculator.

“I was particularly impressed by the technical expertise and collaborative spirit of the cre8 team. Whether we had one-off questions or complex design changes, the cre8 team was always there to assist us.”

Jeremy Cereghino, US Supply & Logistics Manager, IPAC