ALUNOX

The starting point

ALUNOX does not sell to end customers but to the specialist trade. Visitors are rarely looking for “a product” – they are looking for the paperwork behind a material: the data sheet, the safety data sheet, the TÜV or CE certificate. In the right language, and for the right welding process.

That quickly becomes a matrix: five document types, each in German and English, each for MIG/MAG and TIG. Up to 20 file references per material – alongside the category and the designations under EN ISO and AWS. Twenty-seven columns per row in total.

All of it has always been maintained in one spreadsheet, and the team works quickly in it. The same structure as a WordPress input mask would have meant 20 upload fields per product, each filled in by hand. The maintenance effort would have gone up, not down.

What we built

• Implementation of the layout in WordPress
• A custom product search: filters by material category and standard designation (EN ISO for MIG/MAG and TIG, AWS) – not a plugin, but built for this catalogue
• Every result hands over the matching certificates directly – in the chosen language and for the chosen process
• Product maintenance through the existing spreadsheet: the client uploads the updated file in the back end, the rest happens by itself
• A bilingual presence – the language split already sits in the data, not just in the interface

The interesting part: Excel stays the source

The obvious solution would have been to turn the products into WordPress content and build the client an editing interface. We decided against it – for the reason most often overlooked when planning how a site will be maintained: what matters is not which tool is theoretically better, but which one the team actually uses.

The spreadsheet was already there, it was kept up to date, and people were fast in it. So it stayed the data source: whoever changes something changes it in Excel and uploads the file in the back end. Nothing changes in the client's workflow – they simply gain a website that always shows the same state as their file. It has run that way unchanged since 2025.