Because the website home page is one of the top visited pages for a manufacturer, it’s important to quickly establish trust and credibility with a header photo and message.

Use the annotated image below to refer to the four main areas we address.

1. Hero image

A term used to describe oversized content at the top of a website (or “above the fold”), the hero image instantly communicates the following:

  • What your company manufactures
  • The quality of your work and attention to detail
  • Your company’s brand and message

The hero image answers people’s unspoken question: “Am I in the right place and can this company help me?”

For the Titan Abrasive Systems website, company president Brandon Acker provided a high-resolution image of a Titan-manufactured blast room.

I love this image because it’s graphically powerful, very clean, and shows Titan’s exceptional attention to detail.

We highly recommend a high-resolution, highest quality photograph — preferably one taken by a professional. Trust us, your prospects will see the difference. It’s similar to wearing fuzzy slippers to Candidates Night (source).

2. Headline

When writing the headline, you have to consider SEO (aka the header tag and title tag), your message, and brevity.

Too many words look cramped and can be difficult to read. I like to stick with five words or fewer.

3. Navigation / 4. Logo

For manufacturing websites, we use a traditional menu versus hiding it under a hamburger icon (learn why). We’ve used heat maps and session recordings to confirm people rely on the top nav to view the information most important to them.

Best practices for navigation:

  • Place the logo on the left, linked to the homepage (Item 4 in the image)
  • Limit menu items to seven or fewer to prevent overwhelm
  • Use black text on a white background for readability
  • Add small arrow to indicate dropdown menus for additional pages

While we recommend listing all important website sections on the main nav, sometimes you need to highlight news, such as a new product introduction, trade show event, etc.

In Titan’s case, we wanted to quickly direct people to the Parts Store rather than making them search the Products menu for it. We added the blue Announcement bar at the top with a link to the store.

And that’s how you begin to establish trust and credibility with website visitors in three to five seconds.