Groupe Potel et Chabot

—Two centuries of excellence. A French luxury institution.

Before talking about code, let's talk about who this was built for.

Groupe Potel et Chabot is not simply "a high-end caterer." Founded in 1820, Maison Potel et Chabot is one of the oldest and most respected gastronomic institutions in France. Official caterer for Roland-Garros, the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the Paris Fashion Week, and state dinners at the Élysée Palace, the Group orchestrates hundreds of events each year for the world's most prestigious brands, royal families, and governments.

Its Parisian venues are monuments in their own right: Pavillon Cambon (steps from Place Vendôme), Pavillon Gabriel (Champs-Élysées gardens), Hôtel d'Évreux (Place Vendôme), Pavillon Dauphine (Bois de Boulogne). Addresses you whisper, not just click.

A subsidiary of the Accor Group, Groupe Potel et Chabot is built around three complementary Houses:

• Potel et Chabot — The founding House, 200 years of French event gastronomy excellence
• SaintClair — Contemporary and creative gastronomy, led by Executive Chef Sabrina Théodon
• Dalloyau — Iconic French pastry institution founded in 1682, recently acquired by the Group

The project: unite these three Houses under a single digital platform — worthy of their prestige, without sacrificing performance, SEO, or the marketing team's autonomy. A complete overhaul, not a cosmetic refresh.

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01 — High-risk multi-domain SEO migration

The project involved consolidating 7 custom domains under a single Webflow site:

• poteletchabot.com / www.poteletchabot.com
• groupepoteletchabot.com / www.groupepoteletchabot.com
• saintclair.com / www.saintclair.com
• en.poteletchabot.com

Each domain carried its own SEO history, domain authority, and years of accumulated backlinks. Merging them without losing that capital is the equivalent of open-heart surgery: one wrong move, and years of rankings disappear overnight.

02 — Architecting a massive content ecosystem

The Group covers a staggering editorial spectrum: exceptional Parisian venues and sub-spaces, catering services, international destinations, trades and expertise, news, press releases, FAQ, sports projects, and House histories. Each content type has its own requirements: multi-image galleries, downloadable PDFs, videos, and cross-references between Houses.

The challenge wasn't just storing this content — it was structuring it so that a non-technical marketing team could manage, enrich, and publish it in full autonomy, in both French and English, for years to come.

03 — Translating luxury into a digital experience

This is the most subtle challenge, and often the most underestimated.

How does a website capture the atmosphere of a white-glove dinner served at Pavillon Gabriel? How do pixels recreate the hushed elegance of a reception room on Place Vendôme?

The answer isn't in an extra slider or a dark color palette. It lives in every integration decision: white space as a core material (every section breathes, nothing is compressed), precision typography where type sizes, weights, and line heights are calibrated to create a hierarchy that reads instantly, restrained GSAP animations (0.6s scroll reveals, seamless page transitions) that bring life without distraction. Lenis smooth scroll completes the experience: a controlled inertia that turns every scroll into a glide — imperceptible consciously, but one that lodges in the visitor's mind the unmistakable feeling of a premium product.

The Potel et Chabot experience is white-glove service: discreet, precise, impeccable. The website had to be exactly that.

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A project of this scope cannot be improvised. Each phase was structured to guarantee a controlled delivery, preserved SEO, and a client made 100% autonomous from launch day.

Phase 1 — Development: Webflow Build, Integrations & CMS

—CMS Architecture Design

Before opening Webflow, work began with an exhaustive audit of existing content across the Group's legacy sites. The goal: identify every content type, its attributes, its relationships with other content, and its front-end display requirements.

This mapping work resulted in the design of 21 interconnected CMS collections, organized with a color-coded system by content universe to facilitate back-office navigation:

• 🟦 Venues & Sub-Spaces
• 🟪 Services
• 🟨 Destinations
• 🟧 Trades & Trade Details
• 🟩 The Houses
• 🔴 Articles, Categories & Authors
• 🟣 Press Releases
• ❓ FAQ & FAQ Categories
• 🟫 Histories (Potel et Chabot + Dalloyau)
• 🎬 Dedicated slider collections (Gastronomy, Achievements)
• ⚽️ Sports & Entertainment Projects

Each collection was built with extreme granularity. The Venues collection alone includes over 20 structured fields:

• Dedicated SEO fields (Meta Title, Meta Description, OG Image) directly editable by the marketing team
• Factual venue data (Address, Capacity, Area, Number of rooms, Terrace, Auditorium) enabling automated technical sheets
• A MultiImage gallery supporting up to 25 photos per venue
• A Plan PDF field allowing visitors to download the venue floor plan directly
• A Next Venue (Reference) field automatically feeding the "Discover next" block — internal SEO linking with zero manual effort
• A FAQ Category (Reference) connecting each venue to its frequently asked questions, displayed dynamically
• A Position (Number) field to control display order

This same level of rigor was applied to every collection. The Articles collection features a complete editorial system: Author, Category, Next Article (internal linking), Reading Time, Image Layout (left/right), and dual Body + Body 2 fields separated by an inline gallery. The Trade Details collection introduces a double reference — to both Trades (parent) AND The Houses — creating a cross-matrix enabling displays like "Pastry at Dalloyau" or "Service at Potel et Chabot."

—HelpText Writing: Turning the CMS into a Self-Guided Tool

One of the project's most structurally important investments — and least visible to the outside. Over 120 CMS fields were documented with custom helpTexts, written in the marketing team's own vocabulary:

"Title displayed in Google results and browser tabs. Ideally 50-60 characters."

"Parent venue this sub-space belongs to. Choose from the Venues collection (e.g.: Hôtel d'Évreux)."

"Suggested 'read next' article at the bottom of the page. Choose another article from the list."

This eliminates ambiguity at the source. The team never needs to guess what a field expects — the answer is right there, in context, at the exact moment they need it.

—Front-end Integrations

Development combined Webflow's native capabilities with targeted JavaScript libraries:

• Lenis (Smooth Scroll) — Fluid, controlled scrolling compatible with anchors, Webflow interactions, and keyboard navigation
• Swiper JS (Complex Sliders) — Advanced carousels fed by 3 dedicated CMS collections, with a synchronized Grayscale-to-color hover effect for a signature visual interaction
• Schema.org Structured Data — OrganizationWebSiteSchema (Google Knowledge Panel) + FAQPageSchema (FAQ rich snippets)
• Dynamic CMS-driven SEO — Each CMS item automatically generates its own <title>, <meta description>, and Open Graph tags

—Bilingual Localization

The site was configured with Webflow Localization:

• French (France) as primary language, served on /
• English (United States) as secondary language, served on /en/

Each page has independently translated SEO tags — not duplicated automatic translations, but meta titles and descriptions written specifically for each language market.

Phase 2 — Migration: 301 Redirect Plan & SEO Monitoring

—The challenge: migrating from WordPress to Webflow without losing a single ranking

The legacy sites ran on WordPress, with a URL architecture accumulated over years: dated blog articles, orphaned categories, and a deeply nested structure — sometimes 5 levels deep. Concrete example: a single venue page (Pavillon Dauphine) existed under 14 different URLs.

—A two-layer redirect strategy

The redirect plan was built on a two-layer architecture to cover every URL without leaving technical debt:

Layer 1 — Strategic manual redirects (148 rules) Every high-authority SEO URL was crawled, inventoried, and manually mapped to its new destination. These 148 redirects cover six critical families:

• Venues — Converging two competing paths into a single clean architecture
• SaintClair Content — Intelligent redistribution of case studies, expertise, and services
• Potel et Chabot Content — Restructuring into the new multi-house architecture
• WordPress Blog & Categories — Redirecting dated articles and orphaned categories
• English URLs — Redirecting to the localized Webflow version at /en/
• Utility Pages — Contact, press, CSR commitments

Layer 2 — Global Regex / Catch-all rules For the thousands of URLs automatically generated by WordPress (date archives, tags, pagination parameters, media URLs) that have no equivalent in the new architecture, Regex rules were configured to absorb them cleanly — preventing any cascade of 404 errors in Search Console.

—The structural gain: from 5 levels to 2

Shorter URLs, a clear semantic hierarchy for Google, and the permanent disappearance of legacy WordPress structures.

—7 Domain Configuration

—Post-migration Monitoring

• Google Search Console: indexing verification, crawl error monitoring, redirect chain checks
• URL-by-URL testing: manual control of every critical redirect
• Position tracking: strategic keyword monitoring at D+30, D+60, and D+90 post-launch
• Sitemaps: submission of the new unified sitemap, removal of all legacy WordPress sitemaps

Phase 3 — Training & Handoff: Making the Client 100% Autonomous

—The philosophy: a delivered site must live without its creator

Most web projects fail after launch — not because of a technical issue, but because the team in charge doesn't know how to maintain the site. For Groupe Potel et Chabot, autonomy wasn't a bonus. It was a non-negotiable requirement.

—Deliverable 1: Custom PDF Guide

A personalized operational manual covering:

• CMS access and navigation (color-coded system by content universe)
• Management of each collection (detailed procedures, image and text best practices)
• Autonomous SEO (Meta Title, Meta Description, OG Image with concrete examples)
• Publishing and updating (complete workflow, Draft vs Published)
• Multilingual management (pitfalls to avoid, translation workflow)
• Specific use cases (adding a venue with sub-spaces, article with gallery, FAQ linking)

Written in the team's vocabulary, not a developer's.

—Deliverable 2: Video Tutorial Academy

A series of short tutorials (2 to 5 minutes) covering daily operations:

• Adding and publishing a new news article
• Creating a new venue page with its sub-spaces
• Updating images in a Gastronomy slider
• Managing FAQ and associating them with venues or trades
• Publishing a press release with a downloadable PDF
• Translating a page to English
• Modifying SEO information for an existing page

—Deliverable 3: Post-launch Support

Dedicated support to answer questions, correct data entry errors during onboarding, monitor post-migration SEO performance, and validate CMS workflows in real conditions.

The mission was complete when the marketing team could publish their own content — in French and English, with optimized SEO — without asking a single technical question.

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—What this project actually delivered

A website isn't measured by how many pages were built. It's measured by what it generates for the client operating it.

Beyond the numbers:

• 21 interconnected CMS collections forming a sustainable, extensible content ecosystem
• 7 domains consolidated under a single platform with no SEO authority loss
• 2 languages (FR/EN) with fully independent SEO localization
• Active Schema.org structured data (Knowledge Panel + FAQ rich snippets)
• 120+ documented fields — a back-office any team member can operate from day one

Groupe Potel et Chabot now has a digital platform worthy of its two centuries of excellence — performant, autonomous, and built to last.