A design bureau sells engineering reputation. The site does not sell here — it gets the bureau onto the shortlist that people then choose from.
The task
The bureau designs hovercraft, tugs, launches, fishing and cargo vessels, gas carriers. A separate line of work is engineering analysis: finite element strength calculations and computational fluid dynamics.
The buyer here is professional — a shipyard or a shipowner. The sales cycle is long, the decision is prepared by more than one person, and the people visiting the site are gathering arguments for others. Such a visitor does not need promises; they need to establish that the bureau has genuinely designed something comparable.
Shipbuilding is also an international market, and a significant part of it speaks Chinese.
The approach
The catalogue of completed projects is the site’s main argument, not an appendix to it. Each project carries its number and its figures: a tug with 55 tonnes of bollard pull, an environmental station of 4,100 tonnes deadweight, a pilot boat. An engineer judges the bureau by that list, and everything else on the site exists to get them to it.
Projects are split by vessel type: hovercraft, tugs, launches, dry cargo, fishing, passenger, tankers. A specialist arrives with a specific problem and should find something comparable in one click rather than scrolling through everything.
Service areas are kept separate from the catalogue. Design work and calculations sell differently: people come for a strength analysis without ordering a vessel.
Four languages: Russian, Ukrainian, English and Simplified Chinese. Chinese is not a courtesy here — it is the largest market in the industry, and its absence cuts the market off entirely.
A restrained tone with no advertising language at all. Industrial buyers react to exclamation marks in exactly the opposite way: they read as a sign there is not much to show.
The result
The site does the one thing a website can do in this industry: it gets the bureau onto the shortlist. After that it is people and negotiation.
The project catalogue turned out to be the long-lived part — the bureau adds to it without a developer, so the site does not date as new work appears.