Melett Turbohub

Project Overview

Melett manufactures turbochargers, components, and the individual fasteners that go into them. I won't claim I came away understanding turbo mechanics in any depth, but it was a long-running engagement covering quite a spread: a tiered customer portal, their main site, automated document processing, and a multilingual layer.

Turbohub

Melett wanted a secure, customer-only resource platform to share detailed technical documentation with their trade customers. The catch was that not all customers should see the same content: a high-volume account with a broad service relationship should have full access; a smaller account should see a more limited set. So the access control needed to be properly tiered, not just a logged-in/not-logged-in gate.

I built Turbohub on WordPress, integrating it with Melett's own databases to drive the permission logic. Unauthenticated visitors get redirected and prompted to sign in; once in, a second access layer determines what they can actually see based on their account tier. Some content is reserved for Melett's highest-tier customers only.

The image library was a separate problem. Melett's documentation includes a lot of proprietary technical imagery, and they didn't want it scraped and reused elsewhere. I watermarked the full library and, because the volume made manual processing impractical, built a batch process in Photoshop to run through the images and prep them for web at the same time.

Content display used a mix of custom CSS classes, shortcodes (reusable content blocks, in WordPress terms), and accordions to handle the varying content types cleanly. It took a fair amount of styling and configuration to get right, but the end result is a platform you'd need a Melett trade account to view.

Melett.com

The main site was ageing and had new features being requested. Part of the work was making it fully responsive, meaning it works properly on phones and tablets rather than just desktop.

One specific addition was an upsell module on the product pages. When a customer browses a product, a pop-up displays the full product details alongside a related products section, pulling cross-sell suggestions from Melett's own databases based on what's currently being viewed. The display logic was CSS; the data was database-driven.

Catalogues and newsletters

Melett produces a newsletter each month and several catalogues each quarter, all published through FlippingBook, a platform that converts PDFs into an online flip-book format. FlippingBook is not without its quirks, and getting documents through it cleanly was rarely straightforward. To cut the overhead, I built a processing system around it. Melett supplies the base PDFs; the system applies the correct header and footer automatically, depending on the document type (newsletter, catalogue, or build sheet) and the page count. It didn't remove the FlippingBook friction entirely, but it reduced what had been a full day's work to something considerably more manageable.

Internationalisation

Melett operates across a number of countries, so the site needed to serve content in multiple languages and enforce some regional restrictions, blocking certain content by country or IP address.

The service centres page is a reasonable illustration of what that involved: it lists authorised repair centres for a given country, dynamically, some with images and some without, with a map embedded in the page. Melett wanted the listings to load in a random order so no single centre was consistently at the top. I built it so the data is easy to maintain, meaning Melett's team can keep listings current without needing a developer each time.