Work · Sverdrup Steel

Sverdrup Steel

Sverdrup Steel

A multilingual B2B catalogue for a stainless-steel supplier. Custom WooCommerce, FacetWP filtering, in-house steel calculators, signature-PDF archiving - no plugin-pile underneath.

Started
2024
Role
Build & maintenance
Live
www.sverdrupsteel.com
Status
Live
Sverdrup Steel

A multilingual B2B catalogue for a stainless-steel and metal-alloy supplier. Custom WooCommerce, engineering calculators buyers actually use, and a signature-PDF flow that lands as an archived record in customer service. No plugin-pile.

01 · The context

A steel supplier whose catalogue is the product.

Sverdrup Steel sell into industries that don’t tolerate a slow or approximate catalogue: buyers arrive knowing the alloy family, the product form and the standard they need. The brief was specific from the first call: a real B2B storefront across several languages, not a brochure with a cart bolted on.

The easy version reaches for a pile of plugins - one for the catalogue, one for the filtering, one for the languages, one for the forms - and lets them fight each other for the next five years. We took the other road.

02 · The build

One custom theme, doing the work, on purpose.

  1. A custom WooCommerce theme, not a plugin-pile. The catalogue, the templates and the storefront behaviour live in code we own, organised the way the domain actually works: materials by alloy family (austenitic, duplex, heat-resistant, nickel and the rest) and by product form (bar, coil, pipe, plate, hollow section).
  2. FacetWP for the filtering. A steel catalogue is a filtering problem before it’s anything else. FacetWP drives fast, faceted narrowing across a large product set without hand-rolled query code that rots.
  3. Engineering calculators built in. The site carries the tools buyers reach for - PREN (pitting-resistance), hardness conversion, unit and strength converters - built into the platform rather than linked out to someone else’s page.
  4. A signature-PDF archive for customer service. Enquiries that need a signed record generate a PDF on submission, archived and delivered straight to customer service. One clean paper trail, not a mailbox full of loose attachments.
  5. Multilingual from the information architecture up. The catalogue runs across several languages, treated as part of the structure from the start rather than a layer sprinkled on at the end.

03 · The long haul

Built in 2024. Still the same codebase.

The site went live in 2024 and it’s still maintained by the same hands that built it. Nothing here is waiting for a rebuild: the theme is code we understand, the integrations sit behind seams we can change one at a time, and “add a language” or “add a calculator” is an afternoon, not a project.

What we delivered

  • Custom WooCommerce theme for a multilingual B2B catalogue.
  • FacetWP faceted filtering across the full alloy/product-form catalogue.
  • In-house engineering calculators (PREN, hardness, unit/strength conversion).
  • Signature-PDF flow that archives signed enquiries to customer service.
  • Maintained on the same codebase since launch.
01

A catalogue organised the way buyers think

Buyers arrive already knowing the alloy family and the grade they need, so the catalogue is built on exactly that. Materials are grouped by family - austenitic, duplex, heat-resistant, nickel and the rest - and every grade carries its trade name, UNS grade and EN grade side by side, because those are the three references a specifier cross-checks before anything else happens.

www.sverdrupsteel.com/materials/austenitic-alloys
A catalogue organised the way buyers think
02

Filtering is the whole job

A steel catalogue is a filtering problem before it is anything else. Type a name, tick a material family, and the grade tables reshape underneath. FacetWP drives the narrowing, which keeps it quick across a large product set without hand-rolled query code that would rot the first time the catalogue changed shape.

www.sverdrupsteel.com/materials
Filtering is the whole job
03

The calculators buyers already had open in another tab

PREN for pitting resistance, hardness conversion across Brinell, Rockwell and Vickers, weight by product form, ksi to MPa, millimetres to inches, corrosivity classes. Engineers were looking these up on somebody else's page anyway. Building them into the site keeps the person doing the sizing on the supplier's own pages while they do it.

www.sverdrupsteel.com/tools
The calculators buyers already had open in another tab
04

The same catalogue, in six languages

English, German, Danish, Spanish, French and Italian, each a full version of the site rather than a machine-translated veneer over an English original. Language sits in the information architecture rather than in a plugin bolted on at the end, which is why a seventh would be routine content work.

www.sverdrupsteel.com/de
The same catalogue, in six languages

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