Well-designed industrial web sites?

March 22, 2010 9:12 AM

Any examples of well-designed web sites in the industrial/engineering/manufacturing industry?

I've been doing web design on the side, off and on for the past ten years. I love the challenge of creating a good design. So far, all my sites have been public-facing... doctors, small businesses, personal web sites, and people say I do good work.

However, I just got a job designing the web site of a newly formed engineering/manufacturing company. The web sites in this industry are notoriously awful, usually looking like they were designed in FrontPage. Since they are mostly business-to-business sites, their standards are very different from a public-facing web site.

My idea of a well-designed web site is something like SimpleBits or StopDesign. This style wouldn't fit a manufacturing company at all. But I can't accept that "different standards" necessarily equates to "bad design".

So my question is this: Does anyone have any examples of well-designed web sites for small engineering or manufacturing companies? Something that fits the company well, but doesn't look like it was designed in 1999?

I should clarify that I am primarily looking for "online brochure"-type web sites such as this one — lots of information, but very little functionality. My other preference is that the site not be designed in Flash or heavily dependent on it.

So: is "well-designed industrial web site" a paradox, or is there hope for me?

posted by relucent to computers & internet (4 answers total)

Caterpillar has a nice site.
posted by Threeway Handshake at 10:10 AM on March 22, 2010

It's not an engineering site but the place I take my vehicle for service has an excellent site, here.
posted by Confess, Fletch at 11:48 AM on March 22, 2010

Maybe some old-school companies like Grainger or McMaster-Carr? Those are sites which are business-to-very small business/prosumer and have tons of products, but manage sites that don't assault the eye while getting a lot of info across.
posted by clerestory at 12:02 PM on March 22, 2010

I'm not in love with their current homepage image, but BC Tech is a medical engineering company with a pretty clean and straightforward site.
posted by bethnull at 12:55 PM on March 22, 2010