Manufacturing and Industrial Website Design
Built for buyers who order by spec, not by picture.
Distributors, OEMs and contract manufacturers sell to engineers and purchasing agents who already know what they need. The site has to help them find it, price it and get it into a quote — and the ERP has to agree.
Three things we already understand about your buyers.
Fifteen years of manufacturing & industrial work, distilled. If these don’t describe your business, say so — some of our best projects started outside the pattern.
The catalog is the product
If a buyer can't filter by material, tolerance, duty cycle or certification, they call a competitor who lets them. Product data is the whole job, and most of it sits in a PIM nobody owns.
Quotes are the funnel
A manufacturing site converts to RFQs rather than carts. Every step between "found it" and "quote requested" is where pipeline leaks — and where most templated sites bleed out.
The ERP isn't optional
Epicor, NetSuite, Dynamics, or the 2004 system with one person who understands it. Pricing, stock and lead times come from there — otherwise the site is lying.
Scion Steel
A full-line service centre — distribution, processing and fabrication — brought online with a spec-driven finder and a market-update feed their sales team actually uses.
The parts of a manufacturing site that decide whether it works.
Manufacturers and distributors buy websites for the same reasons everyone does, and then discover their requirements are nothing like everyone else's. These are the pieces that actually matter.
Product data is the project
Whatever the proposal says, the real work is usually getting product information into a consistent state: attributes named the same way across ranges, units consistent, options structured rather than described in prose. Everything a buyer wants to do — filter, compare, request a quote — depends on that, and nothing else can start until it is honest.
Search by specification, not by keyword
Engineers and purchasing agents arrive knowing the attribute they need. Filtering by material, size, tolerance, capacity, duty cycle, standard or certification is the feature that decides whether they find you useful. A search box that matches product names is not a substitute.
Quoting paths that match how you sell
Some ranges price live; some never will; many sit between the two and need a configurator or a request tied to a drawing. Forcing all three into one mechanism is why so many manufacturing sites have a "Contact us" button where the commercial logic should be.
The ERP has to agree with the site
Price, stock and lead time come from the system of record, on a schedule people can trust, with failures alarmed rather than silent. A site quoting a lead time the plant cannot hold costs more than it earns, and the damage lands on your sales team rather than on the website.
Distributors and reps need their own path
Tiered pricing, order history, spec sheets, CAD files, warranty documents and the paperwork a rep needs standing on a plant floor. This is frequently the highest-value part of the build and almost always the part left out of the original scope.
Documentation treated as a first-class asset
Data sheets, drawings, certificates, installation guides and safety documentation. Findable, current, versioned and indexable — for buyers, for your own team, and increasingly for the answer engines that now summarise what you make.
Technical search that reflects what you actually do
A real page per process, material and capability rather than one services page listing everything. That structure is what makes you findable for the searches engineers actually run, and it is the single most common structural gap on manufacturing sites.
Site search that behaves like a parts lookup
Handling part numbers, competitor references, partial matches and the abbreviations your customers actually type. General site search treats these as ordinary words and returns nothing, which is a lost enquiry rather than a minor inconvenience.
Multiple languages and currencies, when they earn their place
Worth doing when you genuinely sell into those markets and can support the enquiries in that language. Worth skipping when it is aspirational, because a half-maintained translation reads worse to a buyer than one confident language.
Photography and how the product is actually shown
Consistent product imagery on a consistent background, shot at angles that show the features a buyer is comparing, plus line drawings and dimensioned diagrams where they exist. For technical products a dimensioned drawing frequently sells better than a photograph, and a catalog where half the ranges have studio shots and half have phone pictures from the shop floor reads as a company that is not in control of its own information.
Questions manufacturers ask us.
Do we need ecommerce, or just a catalog and RFQ?
Most industrial manufacturers need a catalog and a strong quoting path rather than a checkout. Transactional commerce earns its place when you have consumable or standard-part revenue where the order is genuinely self-service. We would rather build an excellent RFQ flow than a checkout nobody uses.
We have thousands of SKUs in a spreadsheet. Is that workable?
Yes, and it is the usual starting point. The work is normalising it — consistent attribute names, consistent units, a structure that supports filtering — and that effort is the foundation of everything else the site does. We will tell you honestly how much of it there is before you commit.
Can you connect to our ERP?
Usually. Epicor, NetSuite, Dynamics, Global Shop, IQMS, Plex or a system with one person left who understands it — if it has a database, an API or a reliable export we can work with it. Where it is genuinely inaccessible we will say so rather than sell you an integration that cannot be delivered.
How do we handle distributor and dealer pricing?
Behind a login, with tiers mapped to the customer groups your ERP already maintains rather than a second set maintained by hand. The rule we apply is that pricing logic should live in one place, and that place is almost never the website.
Our buyers are engineers. Does design even matter?
It matters differently. Not decoration — clarity, density, and making specifications easy to compare. An engineer will forgive a plain page and will not forgive one that hides the tolerance table. Good design here looks like a well-made data sheet, not a brochure.
How long does a manufacturing site take?
A catalog and quoting build is typically twelve to sixteen weeks, and product data is the variable that moves it most. Adding ERP integration or a distributor portal extends it further, so we phase the work — the public site can go live while the portal is still being built.
Do you only work with manufacturers in Michigan?
No. We are in Plymouth, Michigan and a good share of our work is regional, but the manufacturing and distribution clients we build for are spread well beyond it. The requirements travel: spec-driven buyers, product data, quoting and an ERP that has to agree with the site.