Papenburg is a shipbuilding town, and that shapes its economy well beyond the shipyard gates. Around shipbuilding there are suppliers in steel and plant engineering, electrical engineering, interior fit-out and logistics; add the port, a lively retail scene and tourism along the fen canals. Digitally, that produces very different tasks: a supplier has to prove its capabilities to international clients, a retailer wants to sell online, a holiday host wants enquiries without a chain of phone calls. For this range we use two systems that we develop and run ourselves — Shopware 6 as soon as something is sold, and TYPO3 when a site needs structure, permissions and several languages.
For maritime suppliers the website is part of supplier selection. Buyers and project managers check certifications, scope of services and contacts there — often in English and long before a first conversation. Then there is the competition for skilled staff, which firms in the northern Emsland also fight through their careers pages. Retailers, for their part, are not far from the Dutch border: whoever sells online soon sells into the province of Groningen too. That leads to concrete technical requirements — a clean multilingual set-up, product and service data drawn from existing systems rather than copies, and a back end your own editors can maintain without us.
In Papenburg we use Shopware 6 for both: the B2C shop of a specialist retailer and the B2B shop through which industrial customers reorder spare parts, consumables or equipment, for example — with customer-specific prices, approvals and a link to your ERP. After go-live comes the part where many shops start to decay. We apply patch releases to a staging copy first, keep plugins compatible, watch logs, queue and search index, and close security gaps promptly. A maintenance contract with an SLA makes this binding: response times of 24, 8, 4 or 2 hours, depending on what an hour of downtime costs your shop.
For the websites of suppliers, service firms and tourism businesses in Papenburg, TYPO3 is our system whenever many pages, several editors and language versions come together — currently on v14 LTS. Many existing TYPO3 sites, however, still run on v12 or older, which no longer receive free security updates. We plan the upgrade path in stages: review extensions, replace abandoned packages, bring custom code up to PHP 8 — all in a test environment while the old site keeps running. Then we take over ongoing care: every TYPO3 security bulletin is checked for relevance, and patches go to staging first, then live. We test backups by restoring them, not just by checking they exist.
From Edewechter Landstraße in Oldenburg to Papenburg takes about an hour. We are therefore happy to hold the kick-off, requirements workshops and sign-offs at your premises; the exact dates we agree together. Development happens in Oldenburg: you see interim builds on a staging environment in your browser, tasks and decisions are recorded in a ticket system, and short check-ins run by video. We have no office in Papenburg, and good collaboration does not need one. The team is reachable Monday to Friday, 9:00 to 16:00 CET, on +49 441 21 21 63 0 — outside those hours only with on-call cover agreed in an SLA.