01 — Client
About the project
A design bureau sells engineering reputation. The website does not sell here: it gets the company onto the shortlist that clients choose from. The bureau designs hovercraft, tugs, boats, fishing and cargo vessels, gas carriers, and performs strength and hydrodynamics calculations.
02 — Context
The brief
The client is a professional: a shipyard or a shipowner. The sales cycle is long, the decision is prepared by more than one person, and the site is visited by people gathering arguments for others. Such a visitor does not need promises. They need to see that the bureau has really designed something similar.
And the shipbuilding market is international, with a large part of it speaking Chinese.
03 — Solution
How it works
3.1
The project catalogue as the main argument
Projects are split by vessel type: boats, tugs, bulk carriers, hovercraft, passenger vessels, tankers. A specialist arrives with a specific task and finds something similar in one click instead of scrolling through everything. Everything else on the site exists to get them to the catalogue.
3.2
A project page with real specifications
Each project has its number, dimensions and parameters: hull length, draft, main engine power, endurance, Register class. An engineer judges the bureau by these figures. Below is a gallery of the built vessel: sea trials, the wheelhouse, the engine room.
3.3
Service areas kept apart from the catalogue
Design and calculations sell differently: people come for a strength calculation or a ship device without ordering a vessel. Each area has its own page with renders, drawings and captions naming the project they belong to.
3.4
Four languages, including Chinese
Russian, Ukrainian, English and Simplified Chinese. Chinese is not a courtesy here: it is the industry’s largest market, and leaving it out cuts it off entirely. The switcher sits in the header on every page.
3.5
A restrained tone without sales talk
An industrial client reacts to exclamation marks the opposite way: they read as a sign that there is little to show. Instead of promises the site shows the managers’ academic degrees, news from conferences and shipyards, specifications.
04 — Outcome
Result
The site does the one thing a website can do in this industry: it gets the bureau onto the shortlist clients choose from. From there, people and negotiations take over.
The project catalogue turned out to be the long-lived part: the bureau fills it itself, without a developer, and the site does not go stale as new work appears.