GMAO Cloud launches a new website

We’ve rebuilt gmaocloud.es entirely. This isn’t a facelift: it’s a new site, with a different structure, different content, and different technology underneath.

Since the outcome of a migration like this is almost never explained — it just gets published and that’s it — we’re taking the chance to explain what we did and why. A good number of the decisions are the same ones we’d recommend to anyone facing a system change, so it may be useful beyond our own case.

First: don’t break what worked

The old site had spent years accumulating rankings on Google. Every URL — every article, every page — had its own history: visits, links from other sites, searches it showed up in.

That can’t be rebuilt. It can be thrown away in an afternoon, and that’s what happens in most migrations: a new site launches, and within a few weeks traffic has collapsed, because the old URLs stopped existing.

So before writing a single line, we did a full inventory of what existed: over a thousand URLs, with the performance of each one. From there, three decisions:

• URLs with history are kept, even if we’d write them shorter today. Some articles have long, ugly URLs, and they stay that way.
• What disappears, disappears properly, telling the search engine it no longer exists instead of leaving behind an error.
• Everything else redirects to its new equivalent, in a single hop.

If you’ve reached this article from an old link or a search result, that’s exactly what just happened along the way.

A structure that makes sense

The old site had grown by accumulation. When that happens, visitors have to guess where what they’re looking for is.

Now there are sections with a clear purpose: the product and its features, solutions by industry, integrations with other systems, resources, and this blog.

Every feature has its own page, and they’re deliberately specific. We prefer explaining exactly what preventive maintenance does, how the technician app works, or what the document manager contains, over filling the site with adjectives.

The content, rewritten

This has been the long part. We didn’t copy the old text over: we rewrote it under a rule we set for ourselves that’s worth saying out loud.

If a claim about the product can’t be verified in the code, it doesn’t get published. No made-up savings percentages, no return figures, no promises of regulatory compliance.

That has visible consequences. We explain, for example, that legal maintenance is not a module in GMAO Cloud: it’s achieved with the preventive maintenance mechanism, by attaching the checklist the standard requires and its frequency. It would be more convenient to sell it as a module; it’s more honest to explain how it’s actually done.

And we also say what we don’t do. That full offline mode is what the technician app has, and that the client app doesn’t work offline. That clients can’t change an order’s status, because that’s disabled on purpose. That we’re not ISO 27001 certified yet, though we’re working on it and committed to obtaining the certification before 31 December 2027.

A site that only says good things doesn’t inform: it sells. We wanted the former.

The visitor’s reading preferences

There’s a part almost nobody talks about that we spent time on.

The site has light and dark mode, respecting your system settings and letting you switch. And it has an accessibility preferences panel with reading adjustments: text size, link underlining, and reduced animations, among others.

It’s worth clarifying what this is and isn’t, because there’s a lot of confusion around it. It isn’t one of those commercial widgets that inject code to “fix” the page on the fly. Those interfere with screen readers — which already know how to read a well-built document — and promise a compliance a button can’t deliver.

Our panel only stores your preferences and lets the stylesheet apply them. If the JavaScript doesn’t load, the page reads exactly the same, because the real work is in how the components are built: headings in order, sufficient contrast, keyboard navigation, and alt text.

We don’t claim compliance with any standard. We describe what we’ve done, which is more useful and verifiable.

Fast because there’s almost nothing to load

The site is built as static pages: the server delivers already-generated HTML, without querying a database or running anything server-side.

The JavaScript that reaches the browser is the minimum needed for what actually requires it — the mobile menu, the theme switch, this blog’s search box — and almost everything works without it.

The blog, which is where you are

This blog brings together the same articles as before, rewritten, plus new ones. You’ll see two types of URL coexisting, and that’s intentional: historical articles keep their original URL — the one that had earned rankings — and new posts go under /es/blog/.

Editorially they’re the same thing and appear mixed together in the listing. The URL is just an address; what matters is the article.

At the top you have a search box and a tag filter to get to what interests you without browsing the whole list.

What’s missing

For the sake of honesty, and because a website is never finished:

English is half-done. Some pages are translated and many aren’t. We’d rather publish only what’s approved than fill the site with machine translations: a badly translated page hurts more than it helps, and announcing a language that doesn’t exist yet generates crawl errors.

There are still articles to migrate. There are over a hundred, and they’re being published in order of usefulness, not alphabetically.

There will be more resources. Guides and support material, which is what we get asked for most and had the least of.

If you find something broken

It can happen. In a migration this size, there’s always some link pointing somewhere it shouldn’t, or some page that doesn’t respond.

If you run into something, get in touch and we’ll fix it. And if what you want is to see the product instead of reading about it, you can request a demo on your own equipment, which is the best way to understand it.

Thanks for reading this far.