Organising company information into a focused directory

A directory is useful when it helps someone find a specific business or understand a small part of a market. I explored that idea with a Swedish company directory organised around company and regional pages.

The project combined a data pipeline with a statically generated website. It was an independent experiment, with the aim of testing whether a focused collection could answer more specific searches.

Treat the input as part of the product

The pipeline ingests company records, filters them and normalises the fields used by the website. Refreshing the collection is intended to repeat the same steps rather than add another manual spreadsheet.

The implementation includes a filter for company-level information. Sole-proprietor personal identifiers, board-member names and home addresses were excluded from the publishing path.

Generate the pages from one collection

Company pages and regional indexes use shared templates. The build reads prepared data and exports static files, along with a sitemap and crawler information.

This keeps the delivered website small. Updating the collection requires a rebuild, so freshness and the refresh process are part of the design rather than hidden background behaviour.

Test the whole route to a visitor

The experiment surfaced a practical lesson: a working build and a responding preview address do not settle the public domain, the source terms or the usefulness of the information.

Those pieces need to be reviewed together. The data source must be suitable for the intended use; the domain must lead to the maintained site; and actual visitor behaviour must support any decision to expand it.

What the experiment established

The documented work produced an ingestion and filtering pipeline, shared company and regional pages, and a static deployment. It did not establish search demand, paying customers or a repeatable commercial outcome.

The project remains an experiment. Before widening it, I would recheck the source permissions, refresh the information and evaluate real search and visitor evidence. The illustration represents organising business information and contains no company records.