Manufacturing web design for buyers, engineers and distributors
A buyer, a design engineer or a distributor comes to your website to check a part number, download a datasheet or ask for a price. We build manufacturers’ websites that answer those requests without an email to your sales office: company and range pages and a request for quote in the base price, the searchable catalogue as an optional module.
Updated
From
£8,000 ex VAT
- Timeline
- 6 to 10 weeks
- Pricing
- Fixed price per stage
Your website is not doing its job if
- Customers email to ask for datasheets and drawings that already exist.
- An overseas distributor finds neither your products in their language nor the person to contact in their country.
- A prospect’s procurement team asks for certificates and company details before approving you as a supplier, and none of it is online.
- You come back from a trade show with contacts, and no page follows up what you showed there.
- You are short of engineers and operators, and the careers page says nothing about the shop floor or the jobs.
What a manufacturer’s website contains
- Optional
A catalogue with depth
Families, ranges, part numbers and variants, with search by part number and technical filters. The data comes from a spreadsheet or an ERP export; if you are weighing up a PIM, read the PIM guide.
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Datasheets and CAD files (with the catalogue)
Every part number carries its current documents: datasheet, manual, certificate, 2D or 3D file.
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Request for quote
From the product page, with the part number, the quantity and the application. The request reaches the area sales manager or the CRM.
- Optional
Distributor locator
A map and a search by country or postcode, kept current from a list your own team edits.
- Optional
Export languages
A full version for each market, catalogue included, with its own URLs. Not a one-page summary in German.
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Credentials, recruitment, trade shows
Pages on plant and capabilities, accreditations and sectors served; current vacancies; a landing page for each show.
Example: a German buyer looks for a part
A typical journey on a site with the catalogue, language and distributor modules, to illustrate. The company and the situations are fictional.
- 1
They type a competitor’s part number into Google and land on the page for the equivalent product, in German.
- 2
They filter the range by diameter and pressure rating, then download the datasheet and the 3D file for their design office.
- 3
They open the accreditations page and collect the certificates their procurement team requires.
- 4
They send a request for quote for 500 units. The part number and quantity reach the export sales manager.
- 5
For small quantities, the site points them to the distributor for their region.
How the project runs
Audit
Interviews with sales, the sales office and the design office; inventory of the site, the product data and the documents.
1 to 2 weeksSpecification
Site map, mock-ups of the page types, catalogue data model, redirect plan, price fixed.
1 to 2 weeksBuild
A delivery every two weeks on a test environment, starting with one product family.
3 to 5 weeksLaunch
Go-live, old URLs redirected, training for whoever will look after the site. One month of fixes against the specification is included.
1 week, then a month of fixes
Durations to scale, using the longest stated
What the price covers
The starting price is for a manufacturer’s website in one language: company pages, product ranges, request for quote, careers, an editing tool and redirects from the old URLs. The catalogue, the distributor map and extra languages are optional modules. The price includes the specification; the audit is priced separately. The final price is fixed after the specification.
- Manufacturer’s website: structure, pages, RFQ, editing tool
- from £8,000 ex VAT
- Product catalogue, fed from a spreadsheet or an ERP export
- from £7,000 ex VAT
- Distributor map and search
- from £1,300 ex VAT
- Audit and roadmap, deducted from the first project we build for you
- £1,650 ex VAT
- Maintenance
- from £390 ex VAT a month
Payment, for each stage
- 30%
- on order
- 70%
- on accepted delivery
Manufacturing company website design: what it must do beyond a brochure
A brochure site presents the company. A manufacturer’s website serves people at work: they have a part number in mind, a specification to meet, a supplier to get approved. Most would rather not have to ask: in a Gartner survey of 632 B2B buyers, 61% preferred a buying experience with no sales rep (Gartner, 2025). What they cannot find on your site, they ask for by email or look for elsewhere.
| Visitor | What they come to do | What the site must offer |
|---|---|---|
| Buyer | Compare, ask for a price, check you can be approved as a supplier. | Request for quote on the product page, accreditations, company information. |
| Design engineer | Check specifications, drop your product into a drawing. | Technical filters, datasheets, CAD files. |
| Distributor | Find a part number, a document, a contact. | Catalogue in their language, a map of the network, access to a customer portal. |
| Maintenance engineer | Identify a spare part, read a manual. | Search by machine or part number, manuals to download. |
| Job applicant | Find out what you make, where, and what the work is like. | Current vacancies, photos of the shop floor, real job descriptions. |
Website design for manufacturers: a checklist to run on your own site
Galleries of manufacturing website design show screenshots, not whether a buyer can do their job on the site. This is the checklist to use; run it on your own site in half an hour.
| Feature | Why buyers need it | How to tell if yours has it |
|---|---|---|
| Search by part number | They arrive with a part number, yours or a competitor’s. | Type five part numbers into the search. How many return the right page? |
| Technical filters | They choose on specifications, not on a range name. | Can you narrow a family down to ten products in three clicks? |
| Current datasheets | They have to attach one to their own file. | Open ten at random: same revision as the one the design office holds? |
| CAD files | A design engineer uses what can be downloaded straight away. | Does the file download without emailing anyone? |
| Quote request carrying the part number | They do not want to explain again what they were looking at. | Send a request from a product page: is the part number in the email you receive? |
| Distributor by country | They want someone nearby who speaks their language. | Look for your distributor in Ireland: findable, and up to date? |
| Complete languages | A summary page is not enough to choose a product. | Does the German version have as many product pages as the English one? |
| Proof for procurement | Procurement checks accreditations and standing before approving a supplier. | Dated certificates, downloadable, within two clicks? |
Website, catalogue, portal: in what order?
Doing everything at once is the surest way to launch nothing. This is the order that holds up best, each stage resting on the one before:
- The audit. One to two weeks to find out what the site and the data are worth, and what to build first.
- The website redesign. Structure, company and range pages, request for quote, redirects from the old URLs.
- The product catalogue. One pilot family, then the others, synchronised from your data source.
- Languages. Once the catalogue is stable, each language is a translation job, not a new project.
- The customer portal. When customers and distributors want to track their orders and reorder online; a B2B ecommerce site if you also want new accounts.
Each stage has its own fixed price and you can stop after any of them. The website and the catalogue share the same data, so nothing is rebuilt when the portal arrives.
When a brochure site is enough
Not every manufacturer needs all of the above. A subcontract machinist working to drawing for a dozen customers has no catalogue to publish: those customers want to see the plant list, capabilities, accreditations and a contact. Five well-made pages with real photos of the shop floor do that job. A subscription website builder is enough, for a budget far below £8,000.
The website described on this page earns its cost in three cases:
- You have your own products with part numbers.
- You sell through distributors.
- You export.
If none applies, keep the budget for something else, for example automating quote preparation.
Frequently asked questions
How much does a manufacturing website cost?
From £8,000 ex VAT for a manufacturer’s website in one language, with a request for quote and an editing tool. The product catalogue is an optional module, from £7,000 ex VAT. The final price is fixed after the specification, before the build.
How long does it take?
Allow 6 to 10 weeks from the audit to launch. The full catalogue and the extra languages follow in stages, without holding up the launch.
Can you pull our catalogue from the ERP?
Yes. The catalogue module reads a file export from the ERP; a link through its API or a connector is a further option. That can be done with Sage 200, Access Dimensions, Pegasus Opera, Odoo, SAP Business One or an in-house system. The audit first checks what the ERP can export.
Who writes the technical copy?
Your people supply the material: datasheets, specifications, application notes. We structure it and edit it, in English or French, and you approve it. Copy written from scratch is quoted separately, and so is translation into other languages.
Will the website bring us quote requests?
It will make them possible and measurable; we cannot promise how many. Each request carries the part number that was being viewed, so you can see which pages are working.
Who owns the website?
The code repository, the hosting and the domain name are opened in your name from day one, and rights in the code pass to you as each stage is paid. Hosting is in the European Union, or in the UK if you ask for it.
What happens after launch?
One month of fixes against the specification comes with the launch. From then on, maintenance starts at £390 ex VAT a month; you stop it by email, effective at the end of the current month.
Read next
- Service
Website redesign
Your site rebuilt around your products and the quote request, protecting your search rankings. from £8,000 - Service
Product catalogue and PIM
Your part numbers online with filters and datasheets, updated from an ERP export or a spreadsheet. from £7,000 - Service
Customer portal
Your customers track orders and find their documents without calling the sales office. from £10,500 - Service
Audit
A review of the website, the tools and the manual tasks, with a costed roadmap. fixed price £1,650
Start with a fixed-price audit
In one to two weeks you know what to build, in what order and in what price range. The audit fee is deducted from the first project we build for you.
£1,650 ex VAT 1 to 2 weeks See a sample report