B2B product directory

What I did for the directory rebuild

I helped plan and build a B2B product directory utilising the Twill framework, Algolia search and Snowplow analytics.

The client's existing platform was end-of-life, with directory data management locked inside a third-party black box. The brief was a full rebuild - bring the data in-house, modernise the editorial surface, preserve every legacy search rule and SEO equity through the cutover.

I delivered the discovery phase, culminating in a 40+ page architecture document defining the technical requirements, system architecture, and a working proof-of-concept against the new stack. Scope expanded during the work as phase-one design surfaced cross-phase dependencies.

Four decisions the blueprint turned on:

• Tools picked for fit, not default. Laravel + Twill chosen over WordPress for the multi-entity catalogue and the admin team's appetite for a modular interface. Algolia via Laravel Scout for sub-200 ms faceted search with every legacy search rule preserved.
• Data model designed for tomorrow. The relational structure was deliberately shaped for future denormalisation and sharding, so the catalogue could scale across phases without painful re-architecture.
• Search ranking the business cared about. Custom prioritisation surfaced paying client placements appropriately within faceted results - without compromising the relevance signal for non-paying queries.
• Scope discipline on both ends. A long-tail legacy analytics surface was scoped out for third-party replacement, keeping the core build lean. A zero-downtime migration plan preserved the deep legacy URL surface - the difference between a clean replatform and a quiet traffic collapse.

How the discovery work shaped it

Before any production code, I ran several discovery sessions with the client to understand exactly what the existing service did well, where it broke, and what the editorial team's actual day-to-day pain points were. The technical decisions - Laravel + Twill, Scout/Algolia, Snowplow - fell out of those conversations naturally. The architecture document was much sharper because it was aligned to the real requirements before a line of production code was written, and the PoC let the client see the new stack handling their actual data before committing to the full build.

How I would describe working together

The discovery phase ran smoothly. The client ended up with a working proof of concept that demonstrated every piece of the proposed system, plus the architecture document as a reference - a complete blueprint to take forwards on their own timeline.

Twill is genuinely underrated as a CMS base - for any client where Laravel makes sense but the editorial interface needs to feel modern, it deserves more attention than it gets.

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This article was drafted with the help of AI to populate the page. I'm in the process of rewriting it - a principle I adhere to across all projects. AI produces boilerplate, not production-quality output.