Chemistry is complicated, the CMS isn’t

ARCHE stands for Assessing Risks of CHEmicals, which is exactly what they do. Anyone putting a chemical, a biocide, a plant protection product or a fertiliser on the European market runs into a wall of regulation: REACH, CLP, the Biocidal Products Regulation, PFAS dossiers, endocrine disruption, the Drinking Water Directive. ARCHE Consulting does the maths, the assessments and the dossiers that get a product through that wall.

The firm started in 2009, with roots in EURAS, a 1996 spin-off of Ghent University. Today more than forty experts work there, split between Ghent (Wondelgem) and Leuven. Toxicologists, risk assessors, modellers. People who read a spreadsheet about metals in soil the way others read the paper.

We designed and built their new website in 2022; it went live in early 2023. It runs on Kirby, in English and Dutch, and replaced their old WordPress site.

This is not a five-page website. It holds fourteen services, each with its own page builder, the right colleagues as contacts (picked from the team list), client testimonials and brochures. It holds more than ninety news items and events, from January 2022 until today. It holds forty team members, each with a detail page. Plus vacancies, trainings, offices, partners, a search function and a cookie notice they manage themselves.

All of it in two languages. All of it editable in the panel, without us. The publication list is the one oddity: more than two hundred scientific papers, filterable by author, year and keyword, come straight out of a database table and appear as virtual pages. Otherwise there would be two hundred folders sitting on the server.

The best part of the site is the toolbox: eighteen scientific tools ARCHE developed or co-developed, from MERAG 2016 through MECLAS and BIO-MET to QSARCHE, the SPERCs tool and a calculator for metal thresholds in soil. Visitors filter on three categories: research and regulatory support, exposure, effects.

Some of those tools are free to download. Others are not — and that’s where the interesting work starts.

The DU Scaling Tool for metals is an Excel calculator meant only for Eurometaux members, for companies that supplied data and for their downstream users. Not something you leave lying around on a web page. So on that tool page there is a button: Request download permission. Name, company, address, email, tick the disclaimer. Send.

What happens next: the request lands in a table and an email goes out to the ARCHE team with all the details and a single button. If someone there is happy with it, they click Activate document here. The requester gets an email with a personal link. Click that link and the file is streamed — and in the same breath the code marks the request inactive.

In other words: the link works exactly once. Forward it to a colleague and you are forwarding a dead address. Mission Impossible, but for spreadsheets about zinc.

The files themselves don’t live in the website but in a folder outside the web root, where no URL can reach them. ARCHE upload them through the panel and attach them to the right tool or service page. The subject line of the email, its text, the label on the button, the message when a link has expired: all of them fields in the panel.

ARCHE run symposia, webinars and training courses, and those come with forms. Building one form is an afternoon’s work; building one every year is a subscription. So we made a template they use to create a new evaluation form themselves: they fill in the list of presentations, add blocks above it with the page builder, add blocks below that only appear after submitting, and the answers come back out as an Excel file.

That last block was their idea: fill in the BPR Symposium evaluation and you immediately get all the presentations as a zip. A thank-you that actually makes people click.

There is a full registration module too. For the fourteenth BPR Symposium (3 March 2026, Sheraton Brussels Airport) delegates fill in their details, their invoicing address, their VAT number and whether they eat vegetarian. The terms — 580 euro excluding VAT, 480 early bird, the cancellation rules — ARCHE manage as an ordinary list. The confirmation email drops the submitted details into its own text, and the full delegate list comes out as an Excel file in one click. One-off campaigns got the same recipe: a form for fifteen years of ARCHE in 2024, a registration for a webinar on the ethanol consortium.

A form on a public website is a magnet for bots. So behind every form on this site sits a row of checks: a hidden field no human ever fills in, a signed time limit that rejects submissions sent too fast, a content filter and a rate limit per visitor. Nothing a visitor ever notices, everything a spammer walks into.

Sometimes a whole page has to be locked. For the pre-consortia around PT11-12 (active chlorine) and around ethanol we built private areas: an ordinary page with the full page builder, but with its own user list that ARCHE manage themselves. Every login is logged. That way they know who saw which document, without an extranet or a second platform getting involved.

Consortium management is a trade of its own at ARCHE: their sister company ARCHE Consortia does nothing else. That site runs on the same codebase as this one, in English, considerably leaner. One kit, two houses.

You can subscribe at the bottom of the contact form and on a newsletter page of its own. That subscription goes straight into Mailchimp: if the address already exists it gets updated instead of duplicated, and every address is tagged WebsiteNewsletter, so ARCHE can see where someone came from.

Since 2026 they can also see their own visitor numbers, in a small dashboard we built separately. No cookies, no trackers, just the figures they need — including how often the contact form was sent. And at the turn of the year the site gets its own new year page, with video and rotating wishes. Even a consultancy for chemical regulation is allowed to wave once in a while.

We built the same kind of site — everything in the client’s own hands — for Netwerk tegen Armoede and MethodiekFabriek. At ARCHE it has been running since 2023, and at the bottom of every page it still says, in small type: launched by Major Tom.