Web design / San Jose, CA
Engineers read to the bottom
Write “innovative solutions for tomorrow’s challenges” at the top of a homepage in San Jose and you’ve lost your best prospect by the second line. The people who buy from South Bay suppliers (contract manufacturers, test labs, machine shops, the firms that sell one obscure component to hardware companies in North San Jose and Milpitas) are mostly engineers, and engineers read differently. They skim the marketing, then go hunting for a tolerance, a lead time, a list of materials or a certification. If it isn’t there, they assume you don’t have it.
So the most useful page on a technical company’s site is often the dullest one to look at: a clean capabilities page with real numbers, written by someone who knows the work and checked by someone who doesn’t. Design’s job there is to make dense information easy to scan on a laptop between meetings, which mostly means good tables, sensible headings and type that doesn’t shrink to nothing.
We’d rather build that well than add animation to a page nobody trusts. When a company does have something worth showing in motion, a part that’s hard to photograph, say, a short 3D render can explain it faster than a paragraph.
Datasheets, PDFs and search
A lot of valuable technical content in Santa Clara County lives in PDFs that search engines read badly and phones display worse. Moving the important parts into proper web pages, with the PDF still there to download, is one of the cheaper wins available to an older industrial site. That’s the kind of thing technical SEO covers, and it usually matters more than keywords.
Early-stage companies have the opposite problem: almost nothing to show yet. Our notes on startup sites explain what a first version needs and what can wait for the Series A.
The San Jose that isn’t on a pitch deck
San Jose is a big city with its own neighborhoods and its own small businesses, and plenty of them have nothing to do with tech. Little Saigon along Story Road is the obvious example: restaurants, bakeries, jewelers, tax preparers and doctors’ offices serving a Vietnamese-speaking community that has been here for decades. Many of those customers search in Vietnamese, and an English-only site quietly loses them.
Speaking of tax preparers: the accountants and planners around here spend a lot of time on stock compensation, because so many clients are paid partly in shares. If that’s your business, put it on the site in those words. Our guide for accountants and planners goes into how to explain specialist work without sounding like a brochure.
Down 101 to Gilroy and Hollister
South of the city, Santa Clara County turns into Morgan Hill and Gilroy, and then the road crosses into San Benito County and Hollister, where the business mix leans toward farming, building and the trades. Customers there search for their own town. A Hollister contractor who only mentions “the Bay Area” is invisible to the person looking for help in Hollister.
Questions from the South Bay
Should our datasheets be PDFs or web pages?
Both. Put the specs people search for on a real page, then offer the PDF for engineers who want to file it.
Can one site work properly in English and Vietnamese?
Yes, with each language on its own pages and a translator you trust approving the copy. Automatic translation is fine for a menu, not for anything medical, legal or financial.
There’s no office to visit. The whole studio runs remotely, and calls stay on Pacific Time. You’ll see the written plan first and then the work itself as it develops, on shared links, rather than one big reveal. More on that on our web design page.