25 years of Krones website: How it grew from one employee to an entire web team

So, in a solo effort she set the strategic agenda for the vast majority of the digital channels created over recent decades. Krones is meanwhile running not only the main website krones.com but also around ten websites of subsidiaries, plus microsites dealing with special subjects, like craftbrewing.krones.com and the recently launched Krones magazine. “Today, it would be downright impossible for a single person to maintain and update the Krones website and at the same time keep moving it forward – for all of that you need a can-do team whose members dovetail neatly and support each other at need,” emphasises Sabine Kolbe-Weber. That is why her Digital Solutions team is looking after all of Krones’ websites.

Award-winning unique design system

The core team at Digital Solutions handles website maintenance on a daily basis – and our unique screen design, too. Anyone clicking through the various websites of the Krones Group will soon realise that they all come from the same background. In 2019, Sabine Kolbe-Weber’s team introduced a modular design system that applies throughout the company, thus standardising the layout of all the group’s websites. So every platform possesses a globally harmonised design with similar navigation and a consistent information architecture – a big advantage because that makes it easy for users to find their way around each of the various websites. But the Krones design system enables the team not only to maintain and update existing websites on a daily basis, but also to launch new ones in no time at all, without great cost and effort, thanks to the development of a flexible modular system. 

And it was worth all the effort: In 2019, the Krones design system won the German Design Award – one of the world’s most prestigious competitions! 

The internet never sleeps

Not a day passes by without a new feature or a new technical development emerging – So it is important to stay on the ball, to keep learning. Things that you used to program yourself nowadays require the expertise of trained specialists. “What’s important for us is to ensure that users find the information they need quickly and easily. Our aim is to put in place a customer-focused, interactive website – with content that is based on object dependencies,” says Sabine Kolbe-Weber. We delved even deeper into the digital world when we transferred the Krones magazine, which used to be published in print, to the microsite Krones magazine, so that we can enter into a dialogue with you, our readers, on a daily basis and show you as much as possible of our Krones world.