When a manufacturer's website brings in no new accounts, my view is that the cause is more often missing conditions than old-fashioned design. Before a design engineer or purchaser makes contact, they want to settle two questions: "can this company do this job?" and "is it safe to hand them our drawing?"
This article decides what to publish on the site to answer those two questions, and how to receive drawings and NDAs (non-disclosure agreements). I cannot promise rankings or more enquiries. What follows is how to fill in the information that stops a buyer's decision.
Buyers filter you three times
In manufacturing, a buyer passes three gates before pressing "Contact us". Work out where your site loses them first, and the places to fix narrow down.
| Stage | Who mainly looks | What they check | What happens when it's missing |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Search | Engineers, purchasers | Whether your processes and materials match | They never open the page, or leave within seconds |
| 2. Shortlist | Purchasing | Size range, tolerances, lot sizes, equipment, lead times, certifications | Companies that need a call to confirm get pushed back |
| 3. First contact | Engineering, purchasing, quality assurance | Whether it is safe to hand over a drawing | With no explanation of information handling, approval stalls internally or in quality |
"High quality", "short lead times" and "customer first" answer none of the three gates. Buyers are looking for facts they can copy into a comparison sheet.
Reworking product or capability pages?
Product and capability pages that lead to enquiries
The fields an enquiry depends on
The first job in improving the site is not a design review but filling in this table. The examples show structure only and are a hypothetical example, not any real company's capability.
| Field | What the buyer is checking | How to state it (hypothetical example) | If you cannot state it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Processes | Whether the job stays in-house or involves subcontractors | Milling and turning in-house; surface treatment at partner plants | At least draw the line between in-house and partners |
| Materials | Whether you have handled their material | SUS304 / A5052 / S45C. Titanium depends on shape | List the main materials and the ones you decline |
| Size range | Whether the part physically fits | Maximum work size 500×400×300mm | Give the range of your representative machine |
| Tolerances, surface roughness | Whether you reach the required accuracy | With conditions: "production ±0.05mm / prototype answered after drawing review" | Say "answered after drawing review" and state the general-tolerance range you support (e.g. JIS B 0405, Japan's general-tolerance standard) |
| Lot size | Whether the quantity fits | From 1 prototype; production up to 500 per month | Your strong and weak quantity bands |
| Equipment list | Whether the machine types and counts are enough | Model, count, stroke, year installed | If you withhold models, give types and work ranges |
| Measurement, inspection | How quality is assured | CMM available; inspection reports issued | List the documents you can issue |
| Lead time | Whether you meet their schedule | Separate prototype and production estimates, with busy-season variation | "Depends on material and quantity" plus how many days a quote takes |
| Certifications | Whether you meet their requirements | Name, registered scope (site, product) and expiry | If none, describe the quality controls you actually run |
| Industries served | Whether you know the industry's demands | Industry names and how you meet their requirements | Customer names only with permission; industry names are often enough |
| Accepted data formats | Whether they can send the drawing | PDF / DXF / DWG / STEP / IGES | List only the formats you accept |
Three points must not slip when you write this.
Tolerance figures are read as promises. Write "±0.01mm supported" without conditions and you will end up declining drawings with different materials, sizes or shapes, and lose trust. Separate the value you hold reliably in production from the best value you can achieve individually on a prototype.
"We handle anything" carries no information. State your strong and weak quantity bands and the conditions under which you decline, and mismatched enquiries fall while the remaining ones improve. Chasing the enquiry count alone pushes this judgement the wrong way.
Decide what you will not publish, too. The buyer needs to know what you can do. How you do it — machining conditions, fixture structure, set-up tricks — is know-how and stays off the site. Customer names and product photos derived from customer drawings appear only with the customer's permission.
If you cannot fill in your own fields, the shortcut is to reread your last ten enquiries and pick out what you are asked by phone or email every time.
Split pages the way buyers search
Put everything on one "Our business" page and neither the person looking for milling nor the one looking for sheet metal can find their part. Split pages by process and put the table's contents on each.
Home
├ Processes
│ ├ Machining (materials / size range / tolerances / lot sizes / equipment / cases)
│ ├ Sheet metal
│ └ Welding and assembly
├ Equipment list (model / count / work range)
├ Quality and certifications (inspection / registered scope / information handling)
└ Contact (consultation without a drawing / quote request with a drawing)
Use the words buyers search with. People often search by material, process and quantity, such as "aluminium machining prototype 1 piece", rather than "precision machining partner". Do not use internal jargon or your product names as headings.
Many firms publish their specifications only as PDFs. Google treats PDF as an indexable file type, but PDFs read poorly on phones and are more work to update. The safer pattern is to put the key specifications in the page text (HTML) and keep the PDF as a take-away.
Never leave it unclear whether a case is real or invented. A project without permission can be anonymised as "industry, material, problem, response", and there is no reason to fabricate a track record.
Make the enquiry form take specifications
Manufacturing forms fail in two ways: too many fields for an engineer mid-design to fill in, or a single free-text "enquiry" box that forces several rounds of email.
The fix is two entry points.
| Field | Consultation without a drawing | Quote request with a drawing |
|---|---|---|
| Company, contact name, contact details | Required | Required |
| Description | Required | Optional |
| Material | Optional | Required ("undecided" can be chosen) |
| Quantity | Optional | Required (prototype / production is enough) |
| Target date | Optional | Optional |
| Use, industry | Optional | Optional |
| Accuracy requirement | Optional | Optional (unnecessary with a drawing) |
| How the drawing will be handed over | None | Required (choose from the methods below) |
| NDA needed? | None | Required (yes / no / want to discuss) |
The "undecided" option keeps people who are still designing from dropping out. Every required field adds effort. Decide what to require by asking "could we make the next contact without this field?"
Also state on screen what happens after sending, such as "We will confirm receipt within one business day and tell you whether we can quote after reviewing the drawing", using a number of days you can actually keep. Field design, error messages and delivery checks for the whole form are covered in the contact-form improvement checklist.
Why not ordinary email or an open upload field
A drawing is not your information; it is the customer's confidential information, and the duty to protect it moves to you when you receive it. Under Japan's Unfair Competition Prevention Act, a "trade secret" is judged on three requirements — usefulness, secrecy management and non-public status — so you are receiving something the customer manages internally as secret (METI).
METI publishes example countermeasures against leaks of confidential information as its Handbook for the Protection of Confidential Information. On top of that, my first recommendation is simply not to receive drawings you do not need for a quote. The less you receive, the less you have to protect.
The problem with ordinary attachments
| What happens | Why |
|---|---|
| Sent to the wrong address | Once sent, it often cannot be recalled |
| It stays in the mailbox | Copies multiply in leavers' mailboxes, shared addresses everyone reads, and forwarding targets |
| Nobody knows who viewed it | No record of downloads or views |
| Rejected for size | Large CAD files bounce and drift to free transfer services |
Switching to password-protected ZIP files solves none of this. In September 2020 IPA reported an attack technique in which encrypted attachments slipped past detection and quarantine by security products on the mail route. Sending the password in a follow-up email on the same channel protects nothing. As the receiving side, the realistic course is an operation that does not assume ZIP files.
The problem with an open upload field
Adding a "attach drawing" field to the website is the riskiest choice. It becomes an entry point for malicious files, a place where attackers can put whatever they like. OWASP (an international community focused on web application security) lists the following controls to layer.
| OWASP point | What it means for manufacturing intake | What to ask your web vendor before ordering |
|---|---|---|
| List allowed extensions | Only what the business needs: PDF / DXF / DWG / STEP / IGES | "Is it an allowlist or a blocklist?" (blocklists are easy to bypass) |
| Validate file type by content, not the Content-Type header | Reject programs with a renamed extension | "Do you inspect content on the server?" |
| Let the system rename files | Avoid exposing file names containing customer names, and overwrites | "What is the stored file name?" |
| Set a size limit | CAD files are large, but no limit lets someone fill your storage | "What is the limit, and what does the user see when exceeding it?" |
| Allow only authorised users | Not on a public page; issue via a reference number or one-off link | "Can anyone upload?" |
| Store on another server, outside the web root | Drawings cannot be fetched by guessing URLs | "Are file URLs public?" |
| Run antivirus or a sandbox | Received files do not infect internal machines | "When do you scan, and are files opened only after scanning?" |
| Apply CDR (content disarm and reconstruction) to PDFs and similar | Remove malicious content inside documents | "Is it supported, and does it break drawings?" |
| Protect against CSRF | Users cannot be made to upload without knowing | "Is there a form token or origin check?" |
| Configure and update libraries securely | Do not leave vulnerabilities in file-parsing components | "Who updates them, and how often?" |
Operational design is needed on top: never attach the drawing to the notification email (that puts it straight back in a mailbox), restrict who can view it, keep download records, and set a deletion period after the project ends.
Choose one of three intake methods
Before changing the site, decide which method fits your volume and team.
| Method | Flow | Suits | Weakness | What drives cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A. NDA first plus a one-off share link | Enquiry → NDA → staff issue an expiring link | A few drawings a month, a clear owner | Needs manual management | Preparing the NDA, operating effort |
| B. Receive-only link from business storage | Show a reference number on the site and send a per-project receive-only link | Volume growing, storage already contracted | Rules for issuing and revoking links | Storage contract, issuing procedure |
| C. Dedicated upload on your site | Receive directly from the form into secure storage | High volume, someone in-house to operate it | Development, ongoing maintenance, vulnerability response | Scope, scanning, monitoring and maintenance |
Most small firms are well served by A or B. C looks convenient, but it is not finished at launch: the controls in the table above have to be maintained. Moving to C while volume is low gives little for the cost. Some buyers' internal rules forbid uploading to outside services, in which case you have to use the method they specify, so do not depend on C alone.
The NDA-first flow
1. Take an overview through the form: material, quantity, outer size
2. Give a first answer on feasibility from the overview (no drawing yet)
3. If promising, sign an NDA
4. Receive the drawing through an expiring link and quote in detail
5. After a lost bid or completion, delete the drawing and record the date
Demanding an NDA in the very first contact adds work for the buyer. Returning a rough figure from the overview and then moving to the NDA saves effort on both sides.
An NDA should cover at least confidentiality, a ban on use beyond the stated purpose, and return or deletion of drawings when the agreement ends. The reference contract examples METI publishes on its trade-secrets page and the Small and Medium Enterprise Agency's model NDA can be consulted as starting points. They still need adjusting to the deal rather than being used as they are, so have individual contracts checked by a lawyer or other professional.
In practice, I recommend storing received drawings separately from your own design data. If they mix with your own technology, it becomes hard to explain later who owns what if the question arises.
Fill in the field table in-house; quote drawing upload separately
What you can do in-house first (roughly a month)
- Read your last ten enquiries and list what you are asked every time
- Mark the rows of the field table your current site does not cover
- Settle tolerance and lead-time wording with your production lead, using values you can hold
- Choose a drawing handover you can use from today: method A or B
- Prepare an NDA template and decide who sends it and when
When off-the-shelf tools are enough: business storage services offer expiring links and receive-only folders. If you can update the website yourselves, you can add the field-table contents without outsourcing.
When the website need not be a priority: if accounts come through referrals or group ties, your capacity is already full, or you rely on a few customers and are not seeking new ones, the site matters less. Trade shows and referrals from existing customers are often faster, and there is no need to force it through the web.
If you outsource: cost varies widely with who prepares copy and photos, how many process pages you build, how far the form is reworked, and which intake method (A to C) you choose. Scope and how costs are set are explained under website fixes and maintenance for product and process pages, and under website growth and measurement for the path to the enquiry and its measurement. Note that building a drawing upload feature (method C) is outside the scope of a small fix and is quoted separately. For reading the contents of a quote, see the guide to system development estimates and market rates.
Start by rereading your last ten enquiries
The smallest thing you can do today is open your last ten enquiries and write what was asked in the first email exchange into the field table above. Any field that comes up three or more times is the first information to put on your site.