Web design / Detroit, MI
Who opens a supplier’s website
A buyer at an automaker almost never discovers a supplier through its website. They hear about you from a referral, a trade show or a sourcing database, and only then do they open your site, to check that you can really do what your salesperson claimed. That visit is short and skeptical. They want to see what you machine, mold, coat or test; whether you hold IATF 16949, which is the certificate they’ll scan for first; where your plants are; and who to email. Too many supplier sites in Oakland and Macomb counties hide all of that behind a slideshow of handshakes and a mission statement.
We’d build the opposite. A capabilities page an engineer can read in two minutes, real photos of your floor and equipment, materials and tolerances written as plain text, and a contact form that reaches a named person rather than an inbox nobody checks. If you supply Stellantis in Auburn Hills, GM’s tech center in Warren or Ford in Dearborn, your site has to survive being forwarded from one procurement desk to the next. For most suppliers a careful website redesign does more than a new logo, although a company renamed after an acquisition usually needs brand identity work in the same project.
Mile roads, not city limits
Ask someone in metro Detroit where a shop is and you’ll often get a Mile road back: Twelve Mile and Woodward, or just off Fifteen Mile. People place businesses on that grid more readily than by city name, and plenty of customers couldn’t tell you whether a store is in Royal Oak or Berkley.
That has two consequences for a local site. Your address, a map and the nearest cross streets belong near the top, written the way people repeat them to a friend. And the suburbs you serve need actual sentences. A plumber covering Warren, Sterling Heights and Troy should name them on pages that matter, because someone in Sterling Heights types “Sterling Heights” into the search bar, not “Detroit”. Good local SEO starts with that kind of plain naming long before anything clever happens.
Inside the city, neighborhood names carry the same weight. A bakery in Corktown or a gallery in Midtown should say so up front; locals use the neighborhood to decide whether a place is close enough to bother with.
Eight Mile and beyond
Detroit sits in Wayne County, but Oakland and Macomb, across Eight Mile, hold more people between them. Farther out, Livingston County (Brighton, Howell) behaves like its own market of commuters and contractors, St. Clair County looks toward Port Huron and the water, and Lapeer stays mostly rural. A roofer in Brighton and a law office in Southfield are both technically metro Detroit, and they need completely different sites. Our guides for contractors and law firms cover what each visitor expects.
Nobody from the studio will turn up at your plant; we’re remote, and we’ll fit calls into your shift pattern, in Eastern Time, instead of asking you to fit ours. You’ll review designs from a shared link, which suits an owner who spends the day on a shop floor and reads email between runs.
Questions from Detroit
We’re a tier-two supplier. Do we need more than a basic site?
Probably more than you have now, and less than you fear. Buyers check you out online, and so do the engineers you’re trying to hire, and a thin site makes a capable company look small. Five or six honest pages (capabilities, equipment, quality, industries served, contact) are often enough.
Can our quality manager update certifications and the equipment list?
Yes. We build in Framer and hand the site over, so whoever owns quality can swap a certificate PDF or add a new press without waiting on us.