How We Built a New Website for an Export Company

The client came to us with a single static page — a logo, a phone number, and a paragraph of company history. It had worked for years because most of their business came from relationships built at trade shows, not from anyone finding them online. That stopped being enough the moment their buyers started expecting to research a supplier before ever picking up the phone.

The brief wasn't 'build a website.' It was 'make it possible for a buyer in another country, who has never heard of us, to trust us enough to send an inquiry.' That's a conversion problem wearing a design problem's clothes, and it changed almost every decision we made.

The first real change was structure, not visual design. A static page has no path — a visitor reads it or leaves. We built the site around the actual questions an export buyer has, in the order they have them: what do you produce, at what volume, to what standard, and how do we start a conversation. Each of those became its own page instead of a paragraph buried in a wall of text.

Certifications and compliance documentation, which had lived in a folder someone emailed on request, became a real part of the site. For an export buyer, a visible compliance page is often the single biggest trust signal on the entire site — bigger than photography, bigger than copy. We treated it as primary content, not a footer link.

The inquiry form was rebuilt around what a buyer actually needs to specify to get a useful quote back — product, quantity, destination port, timeline — instead of a generic 'contact us' box that forces a slow back-and-forth just to establish basic facts. Every field removed from that back-and-forth is a day shaved off the sales cycle.

We also built the site to route different buyer types to different paths. A first-time buyer doing initial research needs different content than a returning buyer who already knows the product line and just needs a fast reorder path. Collapsing both into one generic flow would have underserved whichever group wasn't the primary audience for a given page.

Within the first quarter after launch, inbound inquiries shifted from almost entirely trade-show-driven to a meaningful share coming directly through the site — from buyers who'd never spoken to anyone on the team before submitting a request. The site didn't replace the relationships the business was built on. It gave the business a way to start new ones without waiting for the next trade show.