October 08, 2026
A manufacturing company's website has nine jobs, and a brochure site does one of them. It has to be found for the product, answer the specification, prove capacity and quality, show sizes and packing, put the documents where a buyer can download them, make the enquiry easy, work for a dealer as well as an end buyer, load at a site office on a weak connection, and keep earning the queries buyers actually type. Get those nine right and the visual design question mostly answers itself.
We have built websites for eight businesses in the tile, stone and laminate trade, three solar module manufacturers and one agricultural equipment manufacturer, and we read the Search Console of six of them every month. Over 90 days those six sites collected about 108,000 impressions and 5,300 clicks. What follows is what those buyers looked for, industry by industry, and what the site has to contain to give it to them.
B2B website design is design for a buyer who is spending someone else's money and has to justify the choice. A purchase manager, a project consultant, an importer, a dealer. They arrive with a requirement written down, they compare three or four suppliers, and they send an enquiry to the one whose site let them finish the comparison without phoning.
A brochure site was built for a different reader: someone who already knows the company and wants to be reassured it is real. That is why brochure sites open with a slideshow, a mission statement and an "about us" video, and put the products behind a gallery of photos with no captions. It looks fine to the owner and answers none of the buyer's questions.
The nine jobs above are the difference, and every one of them is a content and structure decision before it is a visual one. A product page needs a specification table, so the design has to make a long table readable on a phone. A download centre needs to hold fifty PDFs sorted by series, so the design needs filters. A dealer needs a different route from an end buyer, so the navigation has to separate them. When we design a manufacturing site we write the brief first, decide the page types, then draw the screens. Drawing first is how a site ends up handsome and empty.
Everything a buyer would find in the datasheet, as text on the page.
That means, for each product series: the sizes in millimetres, every one of them; the thickness; the finishes and the surface types; the weight per piece and per box; pieces per box; boxes per pallet; the technical values the category cares about (water absorption for tiles, module efficiency and temperature coefficient for solar, engine power and fuel type for equipment); the standards the product is tested to; and the variants, with a code for each. Then the photos, then the enquiry form, then the PDF.
The reason to insist on text rather than a PDF or an image of a table is that text is what Google reads and what a buyer can copy into a comparison sheet. A tile manufacturer in Morbi we work with earned 172 impressions for the query "200 x 1000" at position 4.3 and 118 for "1200 x 200" at 3.9. Both came from a size that sat in a specification table. A solar manufacturer we work with earned 1,032 impressions for "topcon solar panel" from product series pages that carry the full electrical and mechanical specification. Nobody searches for adjectives.
The design work here is making a dense table pleasant: fixed first column, units in the header, the most compared values first, and a version of the table that collapses into a card list on a phone without losing any row. That is the part a template cannot do for you, and it is where most manufacturing sites fail on mobile.
With specifics. Plant location and size, the production capacity in the unit the trade uses, the machinery where it is relevant, the certifications by name with the certificate itself available to download, and the tests the products go through.
A download centre is the simplest way to do this well. One page, every datasheet, every certificate, every catalogue, sorted by product series and searchable. On the solar sites we built, the download centre sits alongside pages on quality, technology and reliability, and the certificates are real files, not logos. A buyer who has to email you to ask for a certificate has already marked you down against a competitor who let them download it.
Quality proof is also where the photography matters. Real photographs of the line, the warehouse, the packing station and the loading bay do more than any stock image of a handshake. If the studio shoots nothing else, it should shoot those.
Sizes first, then finish, then packing, then the coverage sum.
Across the eight tile, stone and laminate sites we have built, the product page that works is organised by size and finish, with the packing details on the same page: pieces per box, square metres per box, boxes per pallet, and loading per container. An importer decides on a container, not on a tile, so the site should let them get from a size to a container quantity without a calculator of their own. On one tile exporter's site we built exactly that, a coverage calculator, alongside an e-catalogue and packing details, in seven languages including a right to left Arabic edition.
The search data confirms the order. The Morbi tile client earned 3,523 impressions for the plain query "wooden tiles" at position 11.2, which is page two, and its best positions were for exact sizes and for "wooden floor tiles india", which is how an overseas buyer phrases it. The pages that name the size and the country win. The page that says "premium wooden finish tiles" does not.
Tile sites also need a way to see the product in a room. A gallery of installed photos, organised by application (floor, wall, outdoor, commercial) and linked back to the product code, does the job. Random gallery pages with no captions and no links do not.
The specification, the price, and a way to compare technologies.
Solar buyers come in two kinds. A homeowner or a small installer wants to know what it costs and whether the technology is the right one. A distributor or an EPC contractor wants the module datasheet, the certifications, the warranty terms and the capacity of the plant. The site has to serve both from the same product pages, which is why each product series gets its own page with the full electrical and mechanical specification, the datasheet and the certificates.
The Search Console evidence is unusually clear here. A solar manufacturer we work with earned 45,480 impressions for "install solar panels cost" at an average position of 1.6, from a page that explains the cost honestly. A second solar manufacturer earned 30 impressions at position 1.4 for "topcon vs bifacial solar panel which is better", 50 at position 4.0 for "top 10 solar panel manufacturers in gujarat", and 169 for a price query typed in Gujarati. Cost pages, comparison pages and city pages, all earning positions a home page never could.
For the homeowner side, a solar calculator that turns a monthly bill into a system size and an estimate earns time on site and enquiries. We built one for a solar module manufacturer alongside the product series pages, the download centre, a blog based on real searches, careers and enquiry handling. That is the full shape of a solar manufacturer's site, and it is a long way from a brochure.
The machine by its common name, the parts, the dealer, and a way to work out whether it pays.
An agricultural equipment manufacturer we work with earned 4,677 impressions for "power weeder" and 4,360 for "weeder machine". The same product, two names, and the site has to carry both. It also earned 323 impressions for "spray pump parts", which tells you that parts and service pages matter, and 298 at position 5.1 for "farmer calculator", from a small tool that helps a farmer estimate what a machine saves them.
Agri buyers also differ from tile and solar buyers in where they are. Many are reading on a basic phone in a village with a weak signal, often in Gujarati or Hindi rather than English. The site has to be light, the product names have to appear in the language the farmer types, and the dealer locator has to work with a district name rather than a pin code. A video of the machine working in a field does more than any specification here, but the specification still has to be on the page.
Make it short, put it on every product page, and route it to the right person.
A buyer's enquiry form should ask for the product they are looking at (filled in automatically), the quantity, the country or city, and a phone number or email. Nothing else. Every extra field costs enquiries. A WhatsApp button next to it, opening with the product name already typed, catches the buyers who will not fill in a form at all. Most manufacturers we work with get more WhatsApp messages than form submissions.
A dealer or distributor wants something different: the dealership terms, the territories that are open, the margin structure if you publish it, and a longer form. Give dealers their own page and their own form, and keep it out of the buyer's way. Enquiries from both should land in a system, not a personal inbox, so they are logged, assigned and answered. We connect forms to Google Sheets, Zoho or HubSpot depending on what the company already uses, and to the WhatsApp Business API where the sales team lives on WhatsApp.
Because that is where the buyer is when they open it.
A project consultant checking a tile size on site, a farmer on a 3G connection, an installer on a roof. If the product page takes twelve seconds to show anything, they leave. Manufacturing sites are heavy by nature, full of high resolution product photography and long tables, so speed has to be designed in. We serve responsive images as WebP in several sizes, so a phone downloads a phone sized file, measure Core Web Vitals on every page before launch, and test on a throttled connection rather than on office Wi-Fi.
Speed also sets the limit on animation. A manufacturing site does not need scroll effects on every section. One good product photograph that loads instantly beats a 3D reveal that stalls.
In India today a 5 to 10 page business website costs roughly 10,000 to 40,000 rupees from a freelancer, roughly 40,000 to 1,50,000 from a small studio, and roughly 1,50,000 to 5,00,000 and above from an agency that also does strategy and writes the content. A manufacturing site usually sits towards the top of whichever band you choose, for a reason that has nothing to do with design fees: it is rarely 10 pages.
Ten product series with their own pages, a download centre, quality and technology pages, a dealer section, a city page, a calculator and a blog is 25 to 40 pages before the content is written. Every product series adds a page and a table. Every language multiplies the content. Every integration, whether it is a CRM, a WhatsApp API or an ERP feed for stock, adds development time. Photography and specification writing are separate costs that most quotes leave out, and they are the difference between a site that ranks and one that does not.
What the fee should include: a written brief, the design in Figma, the build, responsive images, speed testing, training and documentation at handover, and ownership of the code, the design files and every credential in your own name. For a designed 10 page manufacturing site, build and testing takes 3 to 5 weeks after design; a larger site with a download centre and a calculator takes longer and is best done in stages.
Where you can, yes, at least as a range with the reasons it varies. The largest query in our client data, over 45,000 impressions, was a cost question, and the page that answered it holds position 1.6. Where prices depend on quantity and destination, say so and explain the factors.
A template can hold a brochure. It struggles with a specification table that has to read on a phone, a download centre with filters, a calculator and a dealer route, which are the parts that earn enquiries. Every site we build has its own structure, assembled from components we reuse.
One per product series, a download centre, quality and capacity pages, a page that names the city, a dealer page, an enquiry route and a small set of articles that answer buyers' questions. For most manufacturers that is 20 to 40 pages, which is why it costs more than a 5 page business site.
The structure, which serves both. Decide the page types from the queries buyers type, write the specification content, then design the screens around it. Article 11 covers the query side in detail.
Sign in with Google to join the conversation. We use it for your display name and nothing else, and your email address is never shown.
No comments yet. Sign in above to write the first one.