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2014 · work

Corporate site for a maker of expanded polypropylene

Drupal developer, Epplix

A small Drupal 7 site for a Dutch producer of EPP foam beads: one clean layout, product grades, markets, a newsroom, in English. The design has outlived the platform it was built on.

Drupal 7 · PHP · LESS · jQuery · Colorbox

epplix.com

Epplix makes expanded polypropylene, the light black foam beads that become car bumpers, cool boxes and the packaging around anything fragile and expensive. In 2014 the company was new and needed a website that said what it made, to whom, and in which grades, without pretending to be a consumer brand. I built that site in Drupal 7. The code has not survived, so this is written from the site itself and from what the Internet Archive kept.

From a placeholder to a site

For most of 2014 the domain showed a single page: the logo, a dotted cloud of beads bursting from a vertical rule, the line "expanding possibilities", and a field to leave an e-mail address. The full site followed in the same look. White space, a thin grey wordmark, the beads spilling across the page as a scattered photograph rather than a pattern, and one large product shot of a moulded part. The structure was as short as the company: EPP, the material; Grades, the bead types; Markets, from automotive to marine; About; a Newsroom; Contact; a search; and a language switch, with English first because the customers were not Dutch.

The archived pages carry the Drupal 7 generator tag and the theme’s own stylesheets, plus Colorbox for the photographs and nothing much else. There was no reason for more. A site like this is read twice by a purchasing manager and then bookmarked, and what it has to do is load fast, look precise and not get in the way of the material.

A white page with the Epplix logo, a cloud of blue dots against a vertical line, the words expanding possibilities, and one field labelled stay informed with a submit button.
The domain during 2014, while the site was being built.
The Epplix home page in 2017: a grey wordmark top left, a menu of Home, EPP, Grades, Markets, About, Newsroom and Contact, a heading Epplix Expanded Polypropylene with two paragraphs, a heap of black foam beads scattered across the page, and a large black moulded foam part on the right.
The Drupal site in 2017.
The Epplix home page in 2026, the same layout: the wordmark, a menu now ending in Vacancies, the same heading, paragraphs, beads and moulded part.
The same page today.
The Epplix home page on a phone: the wordmark, a menu, the heading and text stacked above the photograph of beads.
On a phone.

4 images — swipe or scroll sideways

What survived

Twelve years on, the site at epplix.com answers with a WordPress generator tag. The Drupal build was replaced at some point after 2017, and I was not involved in that. What was kept is everything a visitor can see: the layout, the type, the beads, the moulded part, the copy on the home page word for word, and the menu with Newsroom swapped for Vacancies. Someone rebuilt the platform underneath and left the design where it was.

That is the most a corporate site from 2014 can hope for. The company grew, the CMS changed, and the page a customer lands on has not needed to.