TJ Slade
Web designer · Kansas City
Most manufacturing websites I open in Kansas City look the same. A photo of the building, a paragraph about being family owned since 1978, a page called Services with four bullet points, and a contact form. That describes a shop that does excellent work and a website that cannot prove it. I'm TJ Slade, a Kansas City web designer who works with industrial and OEM companies, and Kansas City manufacturing website design comes down to something narrower than most owners expect: whether a stranger evaluating you at 4pm on a Thursday can confirm you are qualified without calling to ask.
This is a metro with two auto assembly plants, a deep bench of aerospace and ag suppliers, and hundreds of shops holding tight tolerances for customers who have never set foot in the building. Word of mouth still moves a lot of that work. It just does not move it as far as it used to, because the person deciding whether to send you an RFQ increasingly starts on Google, and everything they learn about you before that first call comes from your website.
Your website is a qualification tool, not a brochure
A retail site is trying to sell something on the page. A manufacturing site almost never is. Nobody buys a run of 5,000 turned parts from a web form. What your site is actually doing is getting you onto a shortlist, or getting you crossed off one, and that happens fast and silently, usually by someone who will never tell you they looked.
So the standard for every page is different than it is for a restaurant or a dentist. Not 'does this look nice,' but 'does this answer the question a buyer would otherwise have to call and ask.' Every question your site answers is a reason to keep reading. Every one it dodges is a reason to open the next tab, and there are always other tabs.
What a sourcing engineer needs to see in ninety seconds
When someone lands on your site with a print in hand and a part to place, they are running a checklist. It is remarkably consistent from one buyer to the next, and most shop websites answer about a third of it:
- Processes. Milling, turning, Swiss, EDM, grinding, fabrication, finishing. Name them plainly, the way a buyer would search for them.
- Equipment. An actual machine list with axis counts and work envelopes. This is the page buyers screenshot and send to their team.
- Tolerances and capability. What you hold routinely, not the once-in-a-decade hero part.
- Materials. Aluminum, stainless, titanium, Inconel, plastics, whatever you run often and whatever you will not touch.
- Certifications and registrations. ISO 9001, AS9100, ITAR, NADCAP, and who audited you.
- Volumes. Prototype, low volume, production runs. A shop that wants 50 pieces and a shop that wants 50,000 are looking for different words.
- Industries served. Aerospace, medical, ag, automotive, energy. Buyers want to see their own world on your list.
- Lead times and how to get a quote, including whether you accept a STEP file or a PDF print.
None of that is marketing copy. It is specification, and it is the part most sites leave out because the owner assumes anyone serious will just call. Some will. The ones who are comparing five shops on a Thursday afternoon will not.
The pages most Kansas City shops are missing
Take the checklist above and turn it into structure. Almost every shop site I look at could add four pages and change the conversation entirely.
- A real capabilities page, with the equipment list on it. Not a paragraph, a table. Make it easy to skim and easy to send to somebody else.
- A quality page. Your certifications, your inspection equipment, your process for first article and in-process checks. This is the page that separates a supplier from a job shop in a buyer's head.
- Industries served, one page each if you serve more than two or three. These rank on their own, and they let a medical buyer see a medical page instead of a generic one.
- An RFQ page that accepts a file. A form that takes a STEP file or a print, asks for quantity and material, and tells the sender when to expect an answer. That one page turns your site from a phone number into a front door.
Two more things worth having, though they take longer to build: real photos of your floor rather than stock, and a short set of case studies. Not testimonials, case studies. The part, the problem, the tolerance, the outcome. Buyers trust a specific story about a hard job far more than a line about commitment to excellence.
Hiring runs through your website now too
Every shop I talk to in this metro says the same thing about finding machinists and welders. What often gets missed is that the website is part of that problem. A candidate weighing your job against another one will look you up, and a site that has not been touched since 2014 reads as a company that has not invested in anything since 2014, including its equipment. That is unfair. It is also exactly what a 26 year old with options concludes in about eight seconds.
A careers page with current openings, a few honest sentences about shifts and what the work is actually like, real photos of the floor, and an application that works on a phone will out-recruit a job board post that points at nothing. If you are already spending money on recruiters, this is cheap by comparison. And if you use the MEP National Network, the federal manufacturing extension program with a center in every state, for workforce or process help, say so where candidates and buyers can see it.
The local search side of manufacturing web design
B2B search is not the same animal as 'pizza near me,' but local still matters more here than people assume, for two reasons. Buyers who want a supplier they can drive to search that way on purpose, with terms like machine shop Kansas City or sheet metal fabrication Olathe. And the people you are hiring almost always search locally.
That means the boring local basics still apply: a claimed and complete Google Business Profile, consistent name, address, and phone everywhere they appear, and pages that name the region in a way that is true rather than stuffed. I wrote the plain version of that in how to show up in Google's map pack, and it applies to a shop in the West Bottoms as much as to a coffee bar.
The other half is the terms nobody local is competing for. Process plus material plus industry, written as its own page. Titanium medical components. Short run Swiss turning. Weldments for ag equipment. Those searches are low volume and unbelievably qualified, and most of your competitors have published nothing that matches them.
What I would do this month
If you own a shop and your site has not changed in years, you do not need a rebuild to start. Do these in order:
- Publish your equipment list. Even as plain text on your existing site, it is the single highest value page you can add this week.
- Put your certifications where a buyer sees them without hunting, including the header or footer.
- Add an RFQ form that accepts a file upload and states your typical quote turnaround.
- Take twenty real photos on the floor with a decent phone, in good light, and replace every stock image.
- Write one case study about a hard job you are proud of. One is enough to start.
- Claim and finish your Google Business Profile, hours and photos included.
That list is worth more than a redesign that changes the colors and keeps the same four thin pages. A rebuild earns its keep when the structure itself is the problem: no room for capability pages, nothing you can update without calling someone, or a site so slow on a phone that half your visitors leave before it loads.
If you want a second opinion on yours
I work with industrial and OEM companies around Kansas City, and I am comfortable telling a shop owner that the site is fine and the money belongs in a machine instead. If you want to know where yours stands, send me your address and I will go through it the way a sourcing engineer would and tell you what they can and cannot confirm about you. If you are already past that and want numbers, the ranges are on the pricing page, and it is worth reading what to ask before hiring a web designer whether or not you end up working with me.