Website builds for manufacturers and industrial suppliers

An industrial website is a reference tool as much as a sales tool. Engineers return to it for a spec, purchasing pulls a certificate from it, and a distributor's customer uses it to find a local stocking partner. Each of those visits ends badly if the information sits in a brochure nobody can search or behind a form nobody wants to fill out.

This page covers capability pages, spec sheets and downloads, RFQ forms, caution around export-controlled information, distributor locators, and how our process runs. The content side, from procurement questions to certifications, lives on our manufacturing content hub.

Capability pages a buyer can sort

Buyers come at capabilities from different directions. An engineer starts with a process or a material; a sourcing manager starts with an industry or a part family. One long capabilities page serves neither well. A page per process, each linking to the materials it runs and the industries it serves, lets a reader enter from any side and reach the same answer. Before the sitemap is final, ask your inside sales team, "Which capability do we quote every month that has no page of its own?" The answer can reorder the build. Our note on how many pages a site needs covers the trade-off between depth and upkeep.

Spec sheets and downloadable documents

Google's documentation says it "can index the content of most text-based files and certain encoded document formats," and it lists Adobe Portable Document Format among them. Being indexed is one thing; being easy to read on a phone and easy to quote is another. A PDF is a download, not a page. A sturdier pattern is an HTML page carrying each product's or process's core specifications, with the spec sheet attached as a PDF and a revision number and date on every download, in its file name and on its first page.

Gating is a separate decision. A certificate behind a contact form trades easy access for a lead, and a buyer checking certificates during a supplier review may not want to wait for a sales call, so reference documents are often better left open, with forms saved for quotes, samples and drawings. When a site moves, old document addresses should redirect to current versions. When we moved hudsonsouth.ai from Squarespace to a hand-built Netlify site in October 2026, we kept existing addresses or redirected them.

RFQ forms and export-controlled information

An RFQ form should collect part description, material, quantities and annual volume, tolerance and finish requirements, target dates, and uploads for drawings and models. Submissions are emailed to the business, and before launch the company decides where uploaded files are stored, who can open them, and how long they are kept, because a drawing can carry export restrictions.

Under the Export Administration Regulations, unclassified technology or software is published when it has been made available to the public without restrictions on further dissemination, including "posting on the Internet on sites available to the public," with exceptions for certain encryption software and for software or technology used to produce certain firearms. The Bureau of Industry and Security describes a deemed export as the release of controlled technology or source code "to a foreign person" within the United States, which makes access to an RFQ inbox a compliance question too. Under the ITAR, the public domain definition lists "public release (i.e., unlimited distribution) in any form" as one route, but only "after approval by the cognizant U.S. Government department or agency." These are decisions for your export compliance officer or counsel, not your web designer: drawings, process parameters and technical data stay off the site until they clear them.

Distributor locators and how the build runs

A distributor locator is only as good as its data. It should be built from a list your channel team owns, with each distributor's territory, product lines and contact details, one place to update it, and a visible review date. Territories follow your agreements, by state, region or ZIP code, and anything meant only for distributors, such as price lists, stays off public pages.

Authority Asset, the first of our four steps, collects capability sheets, current spec sheets, certificates, the distributor list, and export compliance decisions on what may be published. Our designers should not have to guess which tolerances your floor holds or which documents your export officer has cleared. Hudson Twenty-One records how your sales engineers explain things, Market Intelligence maps what procurement teams ask, and AEO Creation turns those inputs into answer-first pages. The build adds JSON-LD, an XML sitemap, redirects, mobile and automated accessibility checks, and a quality gate on copy. Staff who will update products themselves point toward WordPress, low upkeep with us making edits toward Netlify, and a smaller supplier wanting a simple editor toward Squarespace.