A precision manufacturer's website has to satisfy two readers who want different things from the same twelve pages. An engineer needs to know whether you can hold a tolerance in the material she has been handed. A buyer, reading it a month later, is working out whether you are a safe supplier to put in front of a purchasing committee, and most sites here serve neither of them well.
Two people read the same page
The engineer arrives with a drawing, or with a problem she has been asked to solve. She wants to know whether you can make the part, in the material specified, at the volume required, and whether you have done something close to it before. She isn't so much reading your copy as scanning it for numbers.
The buyer arrives later, often through a link the engineer forwarded internally, and his questions are different ones. Which approvals do you hold, and are they current. What are your lead times on a normal order, and on a rushed one. What happens when a batch is rejected, and who picks up the phone when it does.
Both of them have to be served by the same set of pages, without either one feeling talked down to. That is the real design problem here, and it is why a manufacturing site ends up looking different from a hospitality site, with fewer full-width photographs and considerably more tables.
Capability information trapped inside a PDF
The most common thing we find is capability information trapped inside a PDF, usually a brochure produced for a trade show, sitting behind a download button on a page called Downloads. Search engines handle those files poorly, and nobody can send a colleague to page four of a PDF. They also stop being updated, so the numbers drift quietly out of date.
Take a spring manufacturer like Shannon Coil Springs, where the material that earns an enquiry is the range: wire diameters, spring types, materials worked, the batch sizes the plant is set up for, what the tooling allows. That belongs on a page as text, in tables, under headings somebody can scan in fifteen seconds.
It is slow work, and most of it falls to you rather than to us, because somebody inside the business has to sit with the production manager and write the ranges out. Expect a few weeks of stop-start effort. Brainstorm, our Irish practice, publishes a longer account of how capability content gets handled, and it is worth reading first.
The pages procurement actually opens
Procurement opens four kinds of page and ignores the rest: quality and approvals, the about page, contact details, and anything naming the sectors you already supply. On the approvals page, list each standard, the certifying body, the scope of the certificate and its expiry date. Make the certificate downloadable while you are at it.
An aerospace supplier such as Metaltech gets judged on approvals in a way a general fabricator does not, so the site should put them near the front rather than three clicks down. If a certificate expired last March and the PDF is still sitting there, somebody running a supplier audit will notice, and that is worse than never publishing it.
The about page matters more than most manufacturers believe, because buyers use it to work out whether you will still be around in three years, which is fair enough when they are designing you into a product. It should say how long you have been trading, who owns the business, how many people work there, and where the plant is.
Photographs of somebody else's factory
Stock photography does more damage here than anywhere else, because your readers know what a real shop floor looks like. They recognise the machines, and they notice when the equipment on the page is not the equipment you say you run. To a reader like that, generic imagery suggests either that you are hiding something or that you have nothing worth showing.
A day with a photographer on the floor costs between CA$1,500 and CA$3,500 in Vancouver, and on most manufacturing projects it is the highest return line in the budget. Shoot the machines, parts in progress, the inspection room, finished components held in a hand for scale. Ask the operators first, and go on a day the floor is busy.
The DesignPro and Macro Stainless sites both depended on that material existing before design started, because fabricated stainless and custom automation equipment are difficult things to describe in words. A photograph of the finished job answers the question quicker than a paragraph does, and we would rather write less copy anyway.
An enquiry form that does some of the qualifying
The standard form asks for a name, an email and a message, and the enquiry arrives saying can you quote this, with nothing attached. Two emails later you find out the quantity is forty and the material is one you don't work with. That costs you an hour a week spread across a year.
Better to ask for what you need in order to quote: the part or application, material, quantity or annual volume, target date, and a drawing upload. Five or six fields is enough, and twenty will lose people who were half way to writing. You will get fewer enquiries, and they will come from people who had a drawing ready to attach.
Put your expectations beside the form rather than leaving them to be discovered: if quotations take three working days, say three working days. If you do not take orders under a certain value, say so plainly, because the alternative is a polite refusal email you end up writing forty times a year.
The site is a reference document for months
Buying cycles here run for months and sometimes well over a year, so a visitor reads three pages in March and comes back in September when a project gets funded. Between those visits your site sits in a bookmark, on an approved supplier list, or in an email sent to a colleague. None of that shows up in your analytics.
That moves the site closer to a reference document than a pitch, so the project pages, the approvals and the capability tables have to stay accurate for years after launch week. Planning what a site says over that kind of period is a discipline of its own, and Brainstorm's notes on content planning set out how we scope it.
In practice that means somebody owns the site after launch, not on a retainer necessarily, just a named person who replaces the certificate PDFs when they are renewed and adds a project every couple of months. Dave Curtin agrees who that is during the build, because it is harder to arrange once the invoice is paid.
What it costs, and when not to spend it
A full website project for a manufacturer usually runs CA$12,000 to CA$30,000 and takes ten to sixteen weeks, most of it content work rather than design. If a brand overhaul is in scope as well, programmes run up to $80,000 and take longer. Projects start at $5,000 where the scope is small and the content already exists.
There are cases where you should not spend it at all, and we will say so on the first call. If your order book is full for eighteen months and the constraint is floor capacity, a new website will not fix that. If four customers account for the bulk of your revenue, the money is better spent on the relationship with them.
If the budget isn't there yet, the useful sequence is photography first, then rewriting the capability pages yourself, then the enquiry form. That comes to roughly CA$3,000 and a fortnight of somebody's attention, and it will usually answer the question before you spend twenty thousand dollars answering it the expensive way.