Lidster Paragon Tool Co Ltd is a specialist cutting tool and drill bit manufacturer. Every product is made in their factory in Sheffield, and their solid carbide, carbide tipped and HSS tools are used around the world in aerospace, automotive, motorsport, medical and injection moulding.
They needed a new website that would explain what they make, show the quality behind it, and turn visitors from the UK and overseas into enquiries.
Lidsters chose us in a competitive bidding process, to deliver the site on a small-business budget. Once we were appointed, we agreed a structured plan with them: what the site needed to do, which pages it needed, who would supply which content, and the order the work would happen in. That plan kept the project moving, and made it easy for a busy manufacturing team to know what was needed from them and when.
A great experience working alongside Artumi, especially Richard. He made the process easy for us to understand and continued to check in on us as we decided on content. Our new site is exactly as we wanted and our expectation levels were exceeded as I know we dragged our feet at times, but Richard politely prompted us when needed and helped us along. We have already seen some great benefits from our ‘click this link’ feature which has brought us new business in.
Many manufacturer websites bury their message under a sprawling menu. We did the opposite. The main navigation has just four items: Home, Products, About Us and Contact Us.
Instead of relying on the menu, each page links onward to the next page that matters. The home page leads to the products and to the company story, the products page leads on to manufacturing and customers, and the route ends at getting in touch. Visitors are guided through the site in the order that matters most to Lidsters' clients: what can you make, can I trust you to make it well, and how do I talk to you.
Lidsters sell all over the world, and an overseas buyer shouldn't have to work out whether a Sheffield factory is open before they pick up the phone. So the site checks the visitor's timezone.
A visitor in the UK simply sees the opening hours:
A visitor from another timezone sees the same hours in London time, with their own local times alongside. For a buyer in Shanghai during British Summer Time, for example:
It is a small touch, but it removes a question from every international enquiry, and it tells overseas customers that Lidsters are used to working with them.
The site is built on Laravel, with a content management system built in Filament PHP. The Lidsters team can update pages, products and images themselves, without needing a developer for everyday changes, and without the plugin sprawl and security upkeep of a general-purpose CMS.
The site was built to the latest web standards: fast, responsive on phones and tablets, accessible, and with clean, search-engine-friendly markup. Each page has one clear job and a clear heading, which helps both visitors and search engines understand what Lidsters make.
A website isn't finished when it launches. Every site depends on frameworks and packages that are regularly updated, often for security reasons. We look after Lidsters' site through our dependency supply chain management systems, which track those updates and bring them in as part of an ongoing service.
Updates are rolled out automatically, and every rollout runs through automated tests first. If a change would break something, it doesn't go live. That keeps the site secure and compliant without the owners having to think about it, and without the risk of an update quietly breaking a page.
This is the kind of web design and web development we enjoy most: a site shaped around how the client's customers actually buy, and looked after properly once it is live.
If your website isn't bringing in enquiries, or has become hard to keep up to date, we can help you work out what it needs.
Please provide your details below and we will do our best to get back to you.
Prefer to talk? Call us on 0114 299 8033, 9am–5pm Monday–Friday.
Artumi Systems Ltd. Company Number 8557359
VAT Reg 889031788
Phone number: 0114 299 8033
Opening hours: 9am–5pm, Monday–Friday