The catalogue that exists only as a PDF from 2016

The PDF catalogue made complete sense when it was made. It was the print catalogue, and putting the print file online was the fastest way to get the product range onto the website. Ten years later it is doing more harm than the site's homepage.

Three separate problems

It is invisible. Search engines can extract some text from a PDF, but a scanned or design heavy catalogue is often just images of pages. Nothing inside it is indexed. Every product in that file is, as far as search is concerned, a product your company does not make.

It is unusable on a phone. A buyer on a 4G connection is being asked to download 42 MB and then pinch and zoom through a print layout to find one grade. Most will not.

It is out of date and nobody can tell. The file says 2016 on the cover. A buyer who finds a product in it has no way of knowing whether it is still made, and the sales team fields the call anyway.

The conversion is less work than it sounds

The catalogue already contains the structured information: a name, a code, a specification table, sometimes a photograph. Converting it means moving that structure onto pages rather than rewriting anything. For a range of two or three hundred items this is typically two to three weeks of careful work, most of it checking that the data is still correct, which is valuable in its own right.

Keep the PDF. Plenty of buyers still want to email it to a colleague or print a section. It stops being the only way in.

What to do with product pages once they exist

• Put the specification in text, in a table, not inside an image of a table
• Give each page an enquiry route that names the product it came from
• Record which pages get traffic, so the range can be pruned honestly
• Keep the URLs stable, because they will be shared over WhatsApp far more than over email

Part of the standard Buildgin audit. The findings are yours whether or not you hire us for the rebuild.