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Manufacturing & E-Commerce

A clean e-commerce build that gets out of the way

SafetySigns manufactures and sells safety signage online. We designed the storefront and built it on Shopify, with the product data modelled properly.

The SafetySigns website we designed and built
Client
SafetySigns

The challenge

What this site had to get right

Industrial and specification-led e-commerce is a different problem from fashion. Buyers arrive knowing roughly what they need and want the spec, the variant, the lead time and the price without a tour. Search and filtering do more selling than the hero image.

Sites in this sector all have to get the same few things right before they can do anything else. These are the ones that shaped this build.

  • Variants were modelled as separate products

    Size, material, finish and quantity break each get their own listing. Now you have six near-identical pages competing with each other in search, six sets of inventory to keep straight, and a customer who cannot tell them apart.

  • Specifications live in a PDF

    Dimensions, materials, compliance data, load ratings — all locked in a datasheet nobody can search and no engine can read. The same data as structured fields on the page makes the product findable and comparable.

  • Manufacturers are forced into a retail checkout

    Plenty of B2B buyers need a quote, a freight calculation or a trade account, not a Buy button. A site that only offers a cart loses them. One that only offers a form loses the small orders. Both paths have to exist.

Approach

How we worked through it

The same four stages on every project, including this one.

  1. 01

    Understand the buying decision

    Before any design, we work out who lands on the site, what they are comparing, and what has to be true for them to make contact. That conversation decides the page structure.

  2. 02

    Structure before styling

    Templates, content model and URL map first. Deciding what repeats — and who edits it — is what keeps the site cheap to run two years after launch.

  3. 03

    Design against the constraints

    Type, colour and layout are chosen with contrast, mobile width and load weight already in scope, so nothing has to be unpicked during build.

  4. 04

    Build, measure, hand over

    Semantic HTML, a performance budget, accessibility checks, analytics configured, and a handover the client's own team can work from.

What we built

The work that shipped

  • Shopify Development
  • Custom Website Design
  • Shopify Development

    A Shopify storefront with the product data model, variants and collection logic set up properly, plus the checkout path kept as short as the catalogue allows.

  • Custom Website Design

    A design system built for this brand rather than adapted from a theme: type scale, colour, spacing and a component set that covers every template the site needs, designed mobile-first and checked for contrast before build.

Results

On publishing results

We publish a number only when we have the client's analytics in front of us and permission to share it. For this project we have neither yet, so there are no numbers on this page.

Stack

What it runs on

  • Shopify

Every site we ship is held to the same baseline regardless of platform: a 1.4 second average largest contentful paint, a Lighthouse performance score of 95 or better, and WCAG 2.2 AA checks on the components we build.

More work

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Want something like this, for your market?

Tell us what the site has to achieve and who it has to convince. We will tell you what it takes, what it costs, and whether we are the right people for it.