The challenge
Burckhardt Compression was established over 180 years ago. With that much heritage comes market credibility, but it also means legacy systems that can hold back progress. This Swiss industrial company employs over 3,000 people and builds compressors designed to last a lifetime. Their digital presence wasn't reflecting this sustainable approach or their ambitious environmental targets of 50% emission reduction by 2027 and net zero by 2035.
The website looked outdated and failed to communicate their sustainability leadership. Complex technical products needed clearer explanations for different audiences. Multiple markets required multilingual content and clear journeys to the correct contacts, whilst the editorial team struggled with the content management system.
The Outcome
Technical Foundation
TYPO3 CMS provided the enterprise-level capabilities this scale of business required. Cloudflare was used to handle global performance and security, including DDoS protection which had previously troubled Burckhardt Compression. The site is available in English and German, with other planned for the future.
AI integration
Rather than adding AI as an afterthought, we built it into the platform's core, using a 3rd party platform, Aendex Engine:
Translations
We’ve built a process into the CMS, that enables editors to translate pages using AI, whilst humans can review and edit before publishing.
Search
The website search allows for natural language queries instead of searching only by keywords. Alongside the search results is an AI answer, that is generated from the content of the website. Users can generate digestible page summaries on demand, which saves editors from constantly rewriting introductions as the content changes.
Generating Content
We’ve developed functionality that in future will allow teams to generate content directly through the CMS itself, this includes writing articles and product pages as well as generating SEO metadata. This is built using a RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) approach, which uses Burckhardt Compression’s unique knowledge repository as its source.
AI Ready
Integrating the website with Aendex brings many opportunities for developing features. For example these could be comparison tools, automated alt-tag generation, and many more.
Content architecture
One of the early UX challenges was to rationalise the content across many different products to make these easier to digest for the audience, and also easier to write. A particular challenge was creating enough flexibility through the components to suit the product while keeping this consistency. Call-to-action buttons throughout the site are tracked, allowing the Burckhardt Compression marketing communications team continuously to learn and improve their campaigns and generate leads with higher quality. The multilingual location finder helps users to find local service centers.
Brand evolution
We’re used to brand guidelines being developed alongside a project. For Burckhardt Compression this is still an ongoing situation, so the important thing was to develop a website that can be adapted so as not to hold up the project.
We moved away from the red and blue palette to a more contemporary black and white approach with coloured highlights. A challenge here was how to make pages with multiple colours feel coherent, and how to enable the editors to implement this. Component-based design solved this, allowing each product page to look different whilst maintaining brand consistency across the entire website.
Working with Liquid Light was exactly what we needed. They followed our ambitious timeline with a pragmatic solution for our complex needs. Their team brought real in-depth knowledge, plus flexible developers and designers who work well together.
What impressed me most was how they understood our limitations with time, budget and resources. They had a real 'can-do' attitude and were willing to make joint efforts to create, build and launch our new website within those boundaries. It felt like having a true partner rather than just another vendor.
The whole team was professional and working toward the same goal. Having worked on many previous web projects, this was the smoothest so far!
Results
The enterprise TYPO3 deployment now handles complex multilingual content smoothly. AI integration enhances user experience further with genuinely useful features.
The website is fully accessible to WCAG 2.1 standard, and its performance is optimised with additional security hardening. All of this directly supports their sustainability goals, as faster websites consume less energy, and effectively supports their sustainability positioning.
The marketing team now receives actionable intelligence from tracked user interactions. Editorial teams across regions can manage content without technical bottlenecks.
Looking to the future, Burckhardt Compression now has a long-term retainer arrangement, recognising that digital optimisation requires continuous development rather than sporadic intervention (something that we strongly believe in).
Our Clients
| Accountability Framework Initiative | Administrative Data Research | Africa50 | African Development Bank |
| Barbican Insurance Group | Bellwood Prestbury | BT Energy | Bühler Group |
| Burckhardt Compression | c2c rail (National Express Group) | Chambers & Partners | Chaucer Syndicates |
| Creative Review | Crop Trust | Department of Health | Design Council |
| Direct Debit | Dixons Group | Edwards Vacuum | Emergency Nutrition Network (ENN) |
| English Partnerships (Government agency) | European Federation of Periodontology | Farriers Registration Council | Formula 1 FIA |
| FSA (Financial Services Authority) | Friends Provident | Geneva International Centre for Humanitarian Demining | Getty Images |
| Global Survivors Fund | Graduate Recruitment Bureau | Greene King | Health Data Collaborative |
| HighWire Press | Horiba | IBM | Industrial Development Board (Government Advisory Board) |
| International Association of Languages Centres | International Group of Department Stores | IOD Parc | John Charcol |
| Land Securities | Leather Working Group | London School of English | Microsoft - MSN |
| Odgers Berndtson | Paragon Publishing | Proforest | Rainforest Alliance |
| Standard Club UK | Specsavers Optical Group | Socialist International | Sulzer |
| Sutton Winson | Sustainable Energy for All | Swiss Life Group | The Biodiversity Consultancy |
| The Barbican Centre | The Infrastructure Consortium for Africa: ICA | The Leonard Cheshire Disability Data Portal | The National Library of Wales |
| The Reproductive Health Supplies Coalition | The Washington Group on Disability Statistics | Thomas Miller Group (and companies) | UKRI (UK Research and Innovation) |
| UHC2030 | Unilever | WHO |
