Webflow Development for a renowned French children's publisher

Founded in Paris in 1923, Groupe l’école des loisirs is a landmark of French children’s publishing. The group brings together 14 brands and entities: publishing houses in France, Germany and Italy, a film production company, the Chantelivre bookshops, two museums, a foundation and a teachers’ review. Over 11,000 titles published, 1,800 authors, distribution in 110 countries.

The group had no institutional website bringing all of its activities together. The mockups were designed by a designer. My role was the Webflow build, with a commitment: the group publishes a CSR policy, so the site had to apply it in its own construction, not only describe it on a page.

A premium Webflow build, with accessibility and eco-design built in.

Finsweet Client First as the naming and structure methodology, the standard among demanding Webflow developers: legible code, well-named and well-organised classes, for a site that stays maintainable and easy to hand over.

A variable system for typography, colours and spacing.

Three linked CMS collections: news, entities, job openings. An article automatically displays the most recent suggestions, a job opening is tied to its entity.

Components Webflow does not provide natively, built with Finsweet Attributes: numbered pagination on the news list, multi-criteria filters with a reset on job openings, CMS-driven carousels.

Light animations for a sense of movement while staying restrained: a scroll-driven timeline for the group’s history, slide-in reveals on scroll.

A responsive build across the three breakpoints, desktop, tablet and mobile.

Accessibility handled from the start of the build: rem units, semantic heading hierarchy decoupled from visual styling, focus states, aria attributes, compliant tap targets.

A documented handoff: a Webflow usage guide, the design system documentation and an eco-design audit, delivered in a shared Notion space, so the team can be as autonomous as possible.

Page weight was a design constraint, not a late optimisation.

AVIF images sized for their actual display rather than the largest possible screen

Vector logos optimised, the heaviest going from 198 KB to 3 KB

Typography reduced to the three weights actually in use, after auditing all 25 URLs, served as static latin-subset files

Hero image loaded with priority, everything else deferred

Third-party scripts documented and argued for, including the consent banner and the analytics tag

Grade A on Website Carbon. 0.06g of CO₂ per visit, cleaner than 95% of pages tested.