What a Welding Shop Website Needs

Who is actually looking

Rarely a member of the public. Usually a buyer, an engineer, a contractor or a maintenance manager with a drawing and a requirement.

They are not browsing. They are checking whether you can do a specific thing, and if the site does not say, they move to the next shop.

Which makes this one of the trades where a website is a straightforward capability statement rather than a marketing exercise.

The businesses that do this well get shortlisted by people they have never spoken to, which is the whole point.

What must be stated

• Processes, named properly: MIG, TIG, stick, flux-cored, spot, and any specialised work.
• Materials, including steel, stainless, aluminium and anything less common.
• Thickness ranges you can handle.
• Maximum size and weight you can take in the shop.
• Certifications, with the standards and the issuing body.
• Whether you do mobile work and how far you travel.

The fourth is the one buyers most often cannot find and most need. A shop that cannot say what it can physically accommodate forces a phone call that a competitor's site made unnecessary.

Certifications, precisely

The part that decides eligibility for a substantial share of the work.

Name the standard, the scope, and the certifying body, because a general claim of being certified means nothing to somebody who needs a specific qualification.

Structural work, pressure work and anything safety-critical has its own requirements, and a buyer with a specification is matching yours against it exactly.

Where certification is held by individual welders rather than the shop, say so and say what they hold.

And keep the currency clear, since these lapse and a buyer relying on an out-of-date claim creates a problem for both of you.

Capacity and equipment

What separates a useful site from a vague one.

The equipment list is worth publishing: what machines, what capacities, what tolerances, and what the shop can physically handle in terms of dimension and lift.

Buyers use this to filter, and being specific means the enquiries you receive are ones you can serve.

It also prevents the opposite problem, which is being ruled out for work you could have done because nobody knew you had the equipment.

A table of capacities is more useful than paragraphs, and it is the kind of page somebody bookmarks.

A worked example

A fabrication shop whose site described them as offering quality welding and fabrication services with attention to detail.

Enquiries were sparse and frequently for work they could not do.

They replaced the text with a capability page: processes, materials, thickness ranges, shop dimensions, crane capacity, certifications with standards and numbers, and a list of the equipment.

Enquiry volume fell slightly and quality rose considerably.

Two contractors said they had found the shop by searching for a specific certification combined with the region, which nobody in the business had considered as a search.

The page took an afternoon to write and required no design work, because it was information rather than persuasion.

Showing the work

Photographs matter here for a different reason than in consumer trades.

A buyer is assessing weld quality, which is visible to somebody who knows what they are looking at.

Close photographs of finished welds, cleanly shot, do more with a technical audience than any general shot of the workshop.

Also worth showing: complex fabrications that demonstrate capability, jigs and fixtures that show method, and anything unusual you have made.

Where client work is confidential, which is common in this trade, detail shots of a joint with no context solve the problem entirely.

The counter-case

Where a different site is right.

A shop doing mostly consumer and agricultural repair work, where the customer is a farmer or a homeowner with a broken gate, and the site should be about turnaround, location and being approachable.

An artistic or architectural metalwork business, where the buyer is choosing on aesthetics and the site is a portfolio.

And a shop working entirely for two or three long-standing clients, where the site is a formality and effort belongs elsewhere.

The capability-statement approach suits shops seeking work from buyers who do not already know them, which is most of them and not all.

Quoting and drawings

A practical section that improves every enquiry.

Say what you need to quote: drawings in which formats, material specification, quantity, tolerance requirements and timescale.

Provide a way to send files that handles engineering formats, since an email attachment limit is a common and avoidable obstacle.

State your typical quoting turnaround, because buyers are frequently working to a deadline and will choose a shop that responds within their window.

And say whether you can work from a sample or a sketch as well as a drawing, since a proportion of enquiries have neither.

Safety and insurance

Required information for commercial buyers rather than a credential.

Liability coverage and amounts, workers compensation status, and any safety programme certification, all of which are asked for during vendor onboarding.

Having those on the site shortens the qualification process and signals that you have done commercial work before.

Where you hold prequalification with contractor management systems, say which, because that alone determines eligibility on some sites.

Turnaround and scheduling

The question that decides a substantial share of work in this trade, and one most shops leave to a phone call.

Buyers frequently have a deadline before they have a supplier, and a shop that indicates lead times is answering the question that ranks the shortlist.

Typical turnaround for small jobs, current lead time for larger fabrication, and whether you take emergency or breakdown work.

The last is worth stating clearly. A plant with a failed component at four on a Friday will pay for a shop that says it handles that, and most sites do not mention it either way.

Lead times go stale, so state them as typical rather than exact, and review the figure quarterly rather than letting a number from 2018 sit there.

What to build first

1. A capability page: processes, materials, thicknesses, capacities.
2. Certifications with standards and issuing bodies.
3. An equipment list with capacities.
4. Detail photographs of weld and fabrication quality.
5. What you need to quote, and how to send it.
6. Insurance and safety documentation.

The first two are what get a shop shortlisted, and they are the two things most welding sites replace with a paragraph about commitment to quality.

Why that kind of paragraph fails is covered in describing a service without listing features.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.