The Client
RR Imperial Electricals Limited reaches its market through a dealer network — 4,500+ of them — alongside its other B2B clients. The day-to-day relationship with a network that size is largely a relationship about information: which product, which certification, which document.
That is a very different brief from a consumer website. Nobody browses an electrical catalogue for pleasure. The people using it are working, usually in a hurry, and usually looking for one specific fact.
The Challenge
RR Imperial came to TRODAD with two problems that were really the same problem seen from two angles.
The first was presence. The company needed a modern, authoritative digital presence — something that held up when a B2B buyer or dealer arrived to assess it.
The second was structure. A vast technical product catalogue had to be organised so that B2B clients could actually navigate it, and a dealer network of 4,500+ needed digital resources they could reach on their own rather than by requesting them.
The second problem is the harder one, and it is where catalogue projects usually fail. Presenting fifty products attractively is a design exercise. Presenting a deep technical range so that a dealer quickly reaches the exact document they came for is an information architecture exercise — and no amount of visual polish rescues a structure that does not match how people search.
The Approach
We started with architecture rather than aesthetics. Before any page was designed, the question was how the range is genuinely organised in the minds of the people using it, and how a dealer arriving with a precise requirement and one arriving with only a rough description could each reach the same destination.
That analysis drove three decisions:
- A database-driven catalogue rather than static pages. A technical range changes. Products are added, specifications revised, certifications renewed. Building the catalogue on structured data rather than hand-built pages meant updates happen in one place and propagate, instead of being re-typed across a site and slowly drifting out of sync.
- A dedicated Resources Hub. The technical documents dealers need were given a home of their own, rather than the more common alternative of leaving them as attachments hanging off individual product pages.
- Navigation designed for B2B behaviour. The menu structure and pathways were built around a working buyer, not a browsing visitor.
This is the part of our work process that clients tend to remember afterwards: the investigation phase that happens before anything visual, because a beautiful interface over a wrong structure is an expensive way to be unhelpful.
The Build
The site was built on WordPress. It is a platform we reach for when a client's content is genuinely alive — as a technical catalogue is — because the alternative is a site that can only be changed by the people who built it, and that is a poor arrangement for everyone except the agency.
The build combined three layers. A corporate site carrying the company's positioning and credibility. A structured, database-driven product catalogue on top of it. And the Resources Hub, holding technical documents where dealers could find them without asking anyone.
Each layer serves a different need, and the same person may use only one of them on a given visit. Building the three as one coherent system — rather than three sites wearing the same logo — was the central engineering task.
The Results
Two outcomes, both as published in TRODAD's portfolio.
Product information and certifications are centralised. All of it now has a single authoritative location. When certifications and product data live in one place that everyone can reach, "where is the current version of this document" stops being a question anyone has to ask a colleague.
Dealer support queries were significantly reduced through instant resource access. This is the outcome that matters commercially. Every document a dealer retrieves themselves is a phone call, an email, or an internal search that does not happen. Across a network of 4,500+ dealers, small frictions removed at scale become real operational capacity returned to the team.
Neither of these came from a clever feature. They came from deciding what the site was for — a working tool for a distribution network, not a brochure — and building for that instead of for the homepage screenshot.
Work With Us
If you have a technical catalogue, a dealer network, or a body of documentation that your customers currently have to ask you for, the pattern above is a familiar one. You can see more of this kind of work in our case studies.
Book a free consultation — let's talk about your project. trodad.com/appointment
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