Comparing a manufacturing web design company

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How to compare manufacturing web design firms

1. Test their work the way an engineer would. Open a live site the firm built and try to find a specific tolerance, material option or downloadable drawing within a minute. If the information is buried behind marketing copy or locked in a PDF with no page around it, the firm builds brochures. Your buyers will behave exactly as you just did.
2. Ask how spec data becomes pages. Specification tables, part hierarchies, material and finish options and CAD downloads all have to come from somewhere, usually an ERP export or a folder of PDFs. Ask who normalises that data, whether it is inside the fee, and how the site stays current when engineering changes a spec next year.
3. Check the search foundations, not the visuals. Ask whether page content is present in the HTML or rendered by scripts, whether every page can carry a unique descriptive title, and how the site handles the long tail of part and process pages. These are structural choices made during the build that a later retainer cannot undo without a rebuild.
4. Get the migration plan in writing. Old industrial sites accumulate part pages and technical documents that quietly bring in qualified traffic. Ask for the URL mapping and redirect plan before work starts, and ask which pages the firm intends to preserve. A rebuild that changes every URL without redirects loses that traffic on launch day.

What sets the price of an industrial build

Data volume drives cost more than design does. A site presenting a handful of capabilities is a modest project. A site with thousands of filterable catalogue items, downloadable CAD files and a live connection to an ERP or product information system is a software build with a homepage attached, and the two should never be compared on headline price. Ask both quotes to state the page count, the catalogue size and every system the site must integrate with, and most of the gap explains itself.

The second driver is who writes. Manufacturers usually hold all the expertise and none of the pages, so a quote that assumes the client will supply finished copy for dozens of capability and application pages has deferred the biggest task in the project rather than removing it. Ask whether writing is included, who does it, and whether that writer has interviewed engineers before. Accessibility belongs in scope too, since the Department of Justice's guidance on web accessibility and the ADA addresses businesses open to the public and retrofitting is always more expensive than building it in.

The failures that show up after launch

The most common is the silent enquiry. Industrial sites convert through requests for quote, and a form that stops delivering, or delivers to someone who left the company, produces a quarter of apparent market weakness that was really a broken inbox. Ask whether the firm monitors form delivery after launch and what the test looks like. That single answer is a reliable proxy for how seriously they take the rest of the engagement.

The second is speed on bad connections. Industrial buyers browse from plant floors and job sites, and heavy galleries and unoptimised drawing previews punish that harder than they punish an office user. The third is ownership: confirm the code, the content management system, the domain and the analytics all sit in accounts your company controls, and ask what happens if you stop paying the monthly fee. Firms building on platforms you cannot leave are making a pricing decision and describing it as a technology one.

Questions people actually ask

Should our drawings and spec sheets be PDFs or web pages?

Both. Keep the PDF for the engineer who needs to file it, but give each significant part or capability a real page with the specifications in HTML. Documents alone are hard for search engines to surface well and hard for buyers to scan on a phone.

Do we need CAD downloads on the site?

If your parts are specified into someone else's assembly, yes, and gated downloads are worth considering only if you actually follow up on the contacts. An ungated download that gets your part designed in is often worth more than a lead record nobody calls.

How much of the project depends on us?

More than most schedules admit. Product data, engineering review and photography are the three dependencies that stall industrial builds. Ask for a schedule that names what the firm needs from you and when, and assign one internal owner for each of those three items.

Can we keep our current platform?

Often yes, and it is usually cheaper. The questions that matter are whether the platform renders content in HTML, whether it allows unique titles and headings per page, and whether it can hold structured specification data. If it can do all three, a redesign on the existing platform is a reasonable path.

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