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Manufacturer website development

For sales directors, product managers and marketing leads at manufacturers with a range of products, variants and trade buyers, who need the catalogue, its documents and the enquiries it generates to live in one system shaped around how their range is actually structured.

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The problem

What goes wrong today

Where it usually starts

A manufacturer with three hundred products and a dozen variants of each keeps the master specifications in a spreadsheet owned by the product manager, the datasheets as PDFs exported from a design tool, and the website as a set of pages last rebuilt from both two years ago.

  • When a variant changes its operating range, the spreadsheet is updated, the datasheet is regenerated and the website is forgotten, so a specifier downloads the old sheet and the first the manufacturer hears of it is a complaint.
  • Certificates are the same problem in another folder: a test report or declaration for one product family sits on a shared drive, and a trade buyer asking which products carry it waits for someone to look.

Where it gets harder

Trade enquiries arrive through one general form.

  • A distributor wanting to stock a range, an engineer asking for a sample and a procurement team requesting a quotation all land in the same inbox, and the sales team sorts them by hand each morning.
  • Buyers in other regions ask where they can buy locally and are sent a list that was last checked when the distributor agreements were renewed.
  • The dealer resource area is a password shared by email, so a former distributor still has the price list.
  • Sales cannot say which products attract enquiries, which datasheets are downloaded and which regions have no distributor at all.

Scope of the service

What the build covers

A custom manufacturer website build normally covers:

  • A product catalogue Where each product carries structured technical specifications, variants with their own values, images and drawings, and the datasheets and certificates attached to it with version and date
  • Application or industry pages That link the products relevant to a use rather than repeating their descriptions
  • Product comparison across a family using the structured specifications
  • A distributor finder by region or country Maintained by sales, that answers where a buyer can purchase locally
  • A trade enquiry flow that distinguishes quotation requests Sample requests and distributor applications and routes each to the salesperson who owns that product group or territory
  • A dealer resource area with approved accounts Price lists, marketing material and technical bulletins that an account can be removed from the day a distributor agreement ends

How discovery works

Discovery walks through the range with you: how products, families and variants relate, which specifications are comparable and which are free text, where the master data lives and whether the site should read from it, which documents belong to a product and which to a family, how territories map to distributors and salespeople, and what dealers may see. Each becomes a named stage in the scope document: publish product, enquire or find a distributor, quotation offline, order through a distributor.

Deliberately out of scope

  • Online ordering and payment, which belong to a trade ordering build, and the engineering document control or product data system in which specifications originate, which the site reads from rather than replaces. Certificates are displayed with the date and scope supplied
  • The site does not assert that a product complies with anything

When the scope grows

Scoping scenario

A manufacturer with four product families, eleven hundred variants held in a product data system, datasheets generated per variant, certificates per family, distributors in forty countries and a sales team split by territory needs the catalogue to update from the master data nightly and enquiries to route by territory and family. That data feed and routing matrix is what makes the project custom rather than a package configuration.

Deliverables

What you receive

  • Discovery notes from a walk-through of the product range, its master data and the current enquiry handling
  • A written scope document naming the catalogue structure, the enquiry routing rules, the master data feed and what is out of scope
  • Design of the product page with specifications and documents, the comparison view, the distributor finder and the enquiry flow on phone and desktop
  • The build, deployed to your hosting or ours, with the dealer area and its account rules in place
  • Migration of products, variants, specifications, datasheets, certificates and distributor records from spreadsheets, PDFs or the product data system
  • Training for the product manager, marketing and the sales team receiving enquiries, with a short written guide
  • Handover material and full ownership of the source code and your content

Process

How a project runs

Each stage maps onto the project view in your client panel. Durations are set in your proposal, never on this page.

  1. Onboarding

    Access to the current site, the specification spreadsheets or product data system, the datasheet and certificate folders and the distributor list by territory.

    Project stage: Onboarding

  2. Planning

    Sessions with the product manager, a territory salesperson and marketing to agree the catalogue structure, document attachment rules, routing and the scope document.

    Project stage: Planning

  3. Design

    Clickable designs of a product page with its variants and documents, the comparison view, the distributor finder and the trade enquiry flow.

    Project stage: Design

  4. Development

    Built in stages: catalogue and documents first, then enquiry routing and the distributor finder, then comparison, application pages and the dealer area.

    Project stage: Development

  5. Client review

    The product manager checks a sample of migrated products against the master data; sales submit test enquiries by territory and family and confirm who received them.

    Project stage: Client review

  6. Revisions

    Specification mappings, document rules and routing are adjusted from the review and re-checked against the scope document.

    Project stage: Revisions

  7. Ready for launch

    Catalogue migrated and verified, the master data feed running, redirects from old product addresses in place, dealer accounts issued, checklist signed off.

    Project stage: Ready for launch

  8. Delivered

    The range is published through the new site; optional maintenance and hosting continue under their own agreement.

    Project stage: Delivered

Integrations

Commonly integrated

Systems this kind of business usually asks us to connect. Each integration is confirmed during discovery; none is assumed.

  • Product data and engineering document systems supplying specifications and datasheets
  • ERP systems as the source of product codes, families and variant lists
  • CRM platforms so a routed trade enquiry becomes an opportunity without retyping
  • Trade ordering systems where distributors or buyers place orders after the enquiry stage
  • Mapping services for the distributor finder
  • Email and marketing tools for datasheet download follow-up
  • Translation management services where the catalogue is published in several languages

How we would approach it

Worked example

Concept demo

A four-family range fed from a product data system

The situation

A manufacturer with four product families and eleven hundred variants held its specifications in a product data system and its website in a page builder that had drifted away from both.

Why it is a custom build

The reason this needs a custom build is the master data feed and the two-dimensional routing; a package can hold a catalogue, but it cannot read one from a product data system in that manufacturer's own structure.

The scope we would propose

  • A nightly read from the product data system that creates and updates products, variants and specification values, with a review queue for anything new before it goes live
  • Datasheets attached per variant and certificates per family with version and date
  • A comparison view driven by the structured specifications so the sales team never builds a comparison table by hand
  • A distributor finder by country maintained by sales
  • A trade enquiry flow that routes quotation requests by territory and sample requests by product family
  • A dealer area whose accounts expire with the distributor agreement

Concept demo: a scoping scenario written to show how we would approach the work. It is not a delivered client project.

Pricing

What affects the price

Every proposal is priced on scope. These are the factors that move it most for this kind of build.

  • Number of product families, products and variants, and how structured the specifications are
  • Whether the catalogue reads from a product data or ERP system, and which one
  • Datasheets and certificates: how many, whether per product or per family, and whether they are generated or uploaded
  • Distributor finder coverage and how distributor records are maintained
  • Enquiry types and the routing rules by territory and product group
  • Dealer resource area, its account approval and what each tier may see
  • Catalogue content in more than one language and who maintains the translations
  • Hosting choice: your own hosting or ours

Start from a package

Manufacturer catalogue package

Specification-led product catalogue with variants, datasheets and certificates, product comparison, distributor finder, trade and sample enquiries and a dealer resource area for manufacturers.

Custom build
View the package

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

How do you decide between a custom build and the catalogue package?

Discovery compares your range and how enquiries are handled against what the manufacturer catalogue package does through configuration. A range maintained in the site itself, with straightforward enquiry routing and a distributor list, usually fits the package. A feed from a product data or ERP system, routing by territory and family at once, or generated datasheets point to custom work, and we say which before anything is quoted.

Can the website take orders?

Not in this build. The manufacturer site ends at the enquiry, the sample request or the distributor referral, with quotation and ordering happening offline or through a separate trade ordering system that we can connect to. Manufacturers who sell direct to trade online need that ordering build, and discovery will say so.

Does showing certificates on the site mean our products are compliant?

No system can claim that. The site displays each certificate or declaration as you supply it, with its date, scope and the products or families it covers, and shows when it was last updated. Whether a product meets a given requirement is for you and your test houses to determine.

Can the catalogue update automatically from our product data system?

Usually, yes, and this is the most common reason a manufacturer site is a custom project. We map your product, variant and specification structure to the catalogue, run a scheduled read, and put new or changed items through a review queue so nothing goes live unchecked.

Who owns the system afterwards?

You do. Source code, the catalogue data and every document are handed over at delivery. Hosting and maintenance are optional, separately agreed and the system can move to another provider.

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