Learning Hub | Planning a Website Design Project

5 Signs You Need to Redesign Your Manufacturing Website

July 13, 2015 | Jon Teodoro

Imagine that your company is an automotive supplier that is scheduled for a B2B meeting with a major automaker – one that can close millions in revenue. Let’s call them the Hord Motor Company. Arriving on the dot in the A.M., you and your best dealmakers are sent from a waiting area into one of Hord’s boardrooms. It will be another easy close; your company puts diamond edge quality into your parts, a point of pride that few other competitors can claim.

Then Hord’s negotiators walk in. Considered a squad of the brand’s brightest people, they clearly slept early, put some color psychology into the inseams of their wardrobes, and could hide a royal flush with their demeanor. It’s their home turf, and they know it.

After the standard gruff introductions, you get ready to set up your laptop for the presentation. But before you can finish connecting, you hear guffaws, snickers, and laughter. You look up and see that your business’ homepage – its mobile-unfriendly – homepage is already being streamed from one of Hord’s representatives’ tablets and boy – if there’s something to be said about that ugly goulash of text, stacked images, and strings of random code, it’s that you need a manufacturing website redesign. So, where did and where are you possibly going wrong?

1. You website is not mobile-friendly

Known in more technical terms as responsive web design, the concept of taking the conventional website and making it compatible for the more dynamic platforms seen in smartphones and tablets has become one of Google’s most championed causes.

Businesspeople – other manufacturers included – are increasingly dependent on mobile technology. iPads, Androids, and the elusive pair of Google glasses abound, most people who receive (or dole out) a company paycheck wouldn’t mind the WiFi password to your office’s connection if they were to step in for a meeting. Just imagine how much more immersive of an experience it would be for them to enjoy your website in your actual building without any hitches in navigating your online presence…

2. Poor Google rank

Speaking of mobile-friendliness, if your website is not a friend to mobile devices, Google won’t be its friend either. Coined “Mobilegeddon,” Google recently revolutionized its ranking algorithms to knock any sites that weren’t responsively designed out of favor. And that’s only part of the iceberg for why your website may have a bad ranking. Curious about the rest of the iceberg? Read on.

3. Lack of updates

Maybe your company literally hasn’t changed its product for decades, nor does it have to. But that doesn’t mean that it is incapable of responding to changes within the industry that relate to your product with some fresh perspective. Whether you want to hold your product’s longevity to a metaphorical ruler against your competitors’ products, write a digest of blogs chronicling how your product has been and continues to be used, or even if you just want to post some warm pictures of your employees having fun at work, let everyone know that the company is more than a stagnant website.

4. Bad formatting

Were you to use the contrast function of a photo editing software suite, dragging the slider to either extreme on a photo would rarely work in your favor. To that effect, under and over-contrasting between your various page fonts regarding matters of size, style, type, and general spatial relativity to your page’s other content (pictures, videos, infographics, buttons) won’t be helpful either. Instead, consider crafting a delicate balance that naturally pulls together similar information under uniting elements like subheads and titles.

5. Confusing web architecture

Chances are that if your website’s visitors can’t find the address of your company headquarters, hours of operation, or an e-mail address to which they can send professional queries, your website is way too hard to navigate. Whether it’s through broken links, misleading site directions, or a deterring user experience in general, buyers don’t want to have to put forth unnecessary work and effort to do business with you; it’s your job to go those extra thousand lines of code, characters of content, and megabytes of bandwidth to do business with them.