Website Strategy for Manufacturing Companies (What Actually Works) | Judd Lyon

Most manufacturing websites look professional, but very few actually support sales, marketing, or long-term growth.

In this episode of The Website Growth Show, Rana Shahbaz speaks with Judd Lyon, a web strategist with deep experience working with manufacturing and B2B organisations, about what actually works when it comes to website strategy for manufacturing companies.

This conversation breaks down why manufacturing websites require a different approach from typical service or e-commerce sites. From long sales cycles and multiple decision-makers to complex products and internal alignment challenges, Judd explains how strategy, messaging, and structure must work together for a manufacturing website to drive real business outcomes.

If your manufacturing website feels disconnected from sales, fails to generate qualified leads, or keeps getting redesigned without results, this episode will help you rethink how your website should function as part of your growth system.

What You’ll Learn

• What website strategy for manufacturing companies really means
  
  
• Why most manufacturing websites fail to generate leads

• Why strategy matters more than design for manufacturers
  
  
• How to improve messaging for technical and industrial buyers
  
  
• The role of navigation and information architecture in complex websites
  
  
• Why redesigns often fail without strategic alignment
  
  
• How to align sales, marketing, and website goals
  
  
• One practical step manufacturers can take to improve their website
  
  

About Judd Lyon

Judd Lyon is a web strategist with over 20 years of experience helping manufacturing and B2B companies build websites that support real business goals. He specialises in strategy-led website development, information architecture, and aligning complex offerings with clear, effective messaging.

Timestamps
00:00 Why manufacturing websites struggle
01:40 What makes manufacturing websites different
04:30 Why design alone does not fix website problems
08:10 What website strategy really means
12:20 Messaging for technical buyers
16:30 Structuring content for long sales cycles
21:10 Navigation and information architecture
26:00 Why redesigns often fail
31:30 Aligning sales, marketing, and website goals
37:00 One action manufacturers can take today

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Transcript

Rana (00:00)
So I really spend a lot of time thinking about, like to say that, you know, every page has a job and that messaging, you think about your, you know, your H1 or your headline and your subheading. I spend a lot of time thinking about page types and what the purpose of that page is. And I'm fairly ruthless about eliminating things that don't contribute. You know, if a page or a page type is not doing its job, you fire it. I'm a big fan of documentation and this is one of AI superpowers and there's no excuse.

There's no excuse nowadays not to document things. It's very easy to summarize things, to document things and to get that in front of everyone. While working on a website strategy, the first step is to understand business, overall business strategy and understand the product or service. What else is needed to develop a winning website strategy? Do not take advantage of the fact that the client does not understand the technology like you do and when something breaks, don't blame somebody else or misrepresent what happened. How AI can...

In your opinion, help manufacturing businesses with getting their website strategy ready.

Rana (00:58)
A website strategy is simply your plan to win. And foremost, B2B and manufacturing businesses, that's exactly what is missing. They have a solid product, experienced sales team and real demand. But their website isn't aligned with how the business actually works or how buyers make decisions. Today's guest, Jed Line has spent over 20 years building and optimizing websites for B2B manufacturers, companies with low traffic, high value buyers. In this episode, we talk about why strategy must come before design and development, how understanding the business and the buyer

changes everything and how manufacturers can turn their website from a static brochure into a real growth asset. If you are serious about making your website work harder for your business, you'll get a lot from this podcast episode.

Rana (01:41)
Judd welcome to the website growth show.

Judd Lyon (01:43)
Thank you, I'm happy to be here.

Rana (01:45)
Excellent and I'm excited to learn how can you turn your website your number one business growth tool. So before we go into tactics and tips, can we start? Why do you love websites?

Judd Lyon (01:57)
Sure. So I absolutely love building websites, promoting websites, learning from websites. I think the interdisciplinary aspect of websites is what really drew me in. It involves copywriting, design, code. mean, it's hard to think of something that crosses so many different.

interrelated disciplines. So I just, love working on websites. I'm 24 years in, so I clearly, I love it.

Rana (02:22)
Amazing.

Amazing and I'm excited to learn from you what you just mentioned these are lot of works which websites needs and get it right to make

a website, your number one business growth tool. What is your favorite part of day-to-day work?

Judd Lyon (02:41)
Sure, so while it's easy to get lost in the weeds on the technical side and there's many different things and that go comprised making a website. But the number one thing I try to always bring it back to the human aspect and the most important thing when you're trying to grow your website, whether you're a small business, whether you're an enterprise doesn't matter. The overarching thing, the one thing you need to get right

is to have a solid strategy. And that looks a little bit different depending on what type of business you're in and who your audience is. But it all starts with understanding who you're trying to communicate with. So while we're talking about technology, it really boils down to the human beings on the other side of the screen. So I always try and keep that in mind when I'm working on websites. Sometimes it's easy to get shiny object syndrome and chase the latest.

greatest technology, but I think if you use that as kind of your grounding principle, you can always, you'll always be in good shape if you focus on, on the strategy. Who are we trying to communicate to? Where are they? You know, what are their feelings? What are their day, like, you know, there's all sorts of research strategies and ways to get feedback, but I think focusing on the human to human piece of it and not getting lost in the technology. I, if you use that as your North star, you'll always be in good shape.

Rana (03:57)
I love it. So I was looking at your secret recipe of building websites and three-step formula strategy, development, and optimization. I'm glad you mentioned strategy. And I wanted to go deep into strategy. Before we go into strategy, you focused on manufacturing B2B manufacturers' websites. Would you like to share why is that?

Judd Lyon (04:18)
Sure, yeah, it's been an evolution for me. I have, as I mentioned, I've been around for a while. I like to joke that I've earned this gray hair. I have worked on small business websites. I've worked in e-commerce. I used to do front end web applications, know, early stage startup stuff. I've run the gamut on the different types of websites I've built over the years and one...

thing that I realized is I got further and further into it. kind of stumbled into some of these larger B2B type sites, companies you've never heard of, doing things that are kind of behind the scenes. And it became very interesting to me when I started to see the numbers and the analytics on some of these sites and the dollar amounts, some random cement truck company doing a hundred million dollars a year. you go, whoa, my goodness. And so

Yeah, I ended up getting into that. I had done a lot of work in the packaging machinery industry and some other kind of industrial type verticals, but I really enjoy working on that challenge. Those sites have an interesting characteristic in that they're very low traffic, but the traffic is very valuable. And so it is professional buyers typically doing research trying to...

gather the information they need to make an informed buying decision. So that's kind of how I eventually evolved and that's where my focus is today. But I've worked on all sorts of websites from the local, you know, mom and pop coffee shop to my own side projects to e-commerce to web apps. So that's kind of the current evolution. The last few years I've really been dialed in on trying to help them solve problems.

Rana (05:54)
That's amazing. mostly the boring businesses who are making money are very interesting to work on. Most people are fine after the shiny object. And I liked what you are doing. that's amazing.

Judd Lyon (06:07)
One, when you're working with early stage startups, it's very

Yeah, so my primary background and kind of my core capability over the years, the through line, if you look at all the different things I've worked on, the heart of it is web development. So I started out more in the design and creative side and then kind of went down the technology wormhole. And so how I got involved with these types of businesses and why they've trusted me to help them is in B2B,

⁓ A lot of the products are hard to explain, so they don't lend themselves to just a very quick and easy explanation. And so a lot of times they're products that have lots of parts or they're highly technical. And so those types of websites tend to be information rich. And so the data modeling, you really need to take your time and be smart about the way you model the data out so that you can make it clear for the end.

the end buyer. So yeah, those sites tend to be fairly data intensive. And one of the things that I really pride myself on, and we'll get into talking about strategy and how you can apply this to any type of website is I'm a big believer in spending a lot of time upfront, understanding the business. So sometimes I even have clients that are kind of like, when are we going to get to the website building? When are we going to start seeing designs? When are we going to start, you know,

spinning up servers. And I think it really behooves you to learn about the business, the problem they solve, who their customers are, the processes behind, know, what is the flow of the way the business works, but also what is the flow of information on the website? How does that need to work? And then I mentioned earlier,

you know, putting people at the heart of everything you do, that's the center of all this. And you'll learn this as you kind of like work on bigger and bigger projects over time. There's always a people aspect and a process of the people. So knowing how the business is structured, who reports to who, all those sorts of things will influence what you can get done, how quickly it's gonna happen. And so I really try and big on planning upfront, you know, the old.

the old saying of ⁓ measure twice, cut once. I think that really is a smart idea to take your time upfront and learn what problems you're trying to solve, why they're trying to solve them. And then the technology and the design emanates from there and you can figure that out. But if you don't understand how the business works, you're gonna have a hard time creating a clear high converting website.

Rana (08:33)
I could not agree more.

And I love you spent time on planning before the execution. I think I read Brian Tracy years ago that every minute spent on planning saves you 12 minutes in execution. So if I'm right, I think these are the numbers. So I loved you do that. And OK, let's get back to your favorite part, the website strategy, the successful website strategy, particularly for manufacturing businesses. How do you define a?

Judd Lyon (08:45)
Exactly. Yeah.

Rana (08:59)
successful website strategy.

Judd Lyon (09:00)
Yeah, so strategy, I used to get lost in frameworks and I've read a number of things on strategy. My favorite book on this is a very simple short book and it's a great resource. I recommend it. It's by a gentleman named Alex H. Smith, I believe is his name and the book is called No BS Strategy. And the whole point is,

What can you actually get done? What is your plan to win? And he kind of, he kind of boils it down to the essence. He's very much kind of a minimalist first principles type thinker. And really your strategy is, is your plan to win. And so it, you know, boiled down. So how that works on the website of things, cause we're talking websites and website growth is you first need to understand what the business's overall strategy is.

So now you don't have to know it inside and out and you're also dependent on what the client's willing to share with you, but you need to understand the general overarching idea of how their business works, who their customers are, how they make money. And then the web strategy really extends from that. And typically I work with the marketing side of these companies. So I'll work with like a...

a VP of marketing or a head of marketing. So I'm working through the marketing side, not like a CTO or on the, on the technical side. So typically you're going to have, you know, at the top level, you're going to have their business strategy within their business strategy. They're going to have their market strategy or their go-to-market strategy, which is going to be their marketing strategy. And then from there, we're talking their digital strategy or their website strategy. And that's kind of where.

We in our profession, that's where we come in is we help them execute that marketing strategy and help that kind of manifest online. Nowadays, those two marketing strategy and digital strategy are for the most part, when we talk marketing strategy, nowadays we're talking digital strategy. But in the industries I work in, trade shows are really the biggest marketing spend. So there's very much in real life.

aspect to it. So when we're talking web strategy, you need to figure out what context you're kind of fitting in into the overall business goals. yeah, strategy is simply mapping out a plan for how this website can contribute to their marketing success and in turn how the marketing can contribute to the overall business success.

Rana (11:18)
Amazing. basically the web strategy cannot be different strategy. It should support your business outcome. The clearer the business strategy is, the better the website strategy can be.

Judd Lyon (11:31)
100%, and I'll share, you're in the business of making websites for others, I'll share a bit of a tip for you, is when you're in the prospecting stage, or you're on a sales call, or you're looking for companies to work with, or you're responding to an RFP, or whatever your new business process looks like, when you're talking to that business, if they have a hard time articulating what their business strategy is, or it's very unclear what they do,

you're going to have a very hard time creating a website that delivers business results because they have an upstream problem. They've got a bigger problem than, you know, what a website can solve. So you need to be very careful. That can be a little bit of a, little bit of a red flag and you want to set yourself up for success. An amazing website. And I've seen this before more in B2C where a company will hire a very talented agency.

And they'll create an incredible website. mean, the design is fantastic, very clear copy. mean, just, you know, 10 out of 10 on the, on the design and the persuasion, fast loading. mean, you, you name it, they just nail it. But the business itself doesn't deliver on those promises. And so you go look at things like, you know, if it's an e-commerce site, you go look at the reviews or you go to, you know,

in whatever country and there's something, you here it's the Better Business Bureau somewhere else might be something else, but you go look at like, maybe the business has complaints against it. And so there's a mismatch. like to use the word congruence. I like to think about keeping things aligning the business strategy with the marketing strategy with the website strategy and a beautiful website. If the company doesn't actually live those values and deliver on what the promise is, even the greatest website by the most talented agency or freelancer is not going to paint over.

Rana (13:14)
I agree. as you earlier mentioned that a boring cement company making turnover hundreds of millions of dollars. in a website strategy, how important is the product that the product or service is solving the actual problem?

Judd Lyon (13:29)
Yeah, it's very important. one thing you can look at is kind of a track record of the company. And one thing that I think is an easy, simple kind of heuristic to use as you're working on a website and something that I think about, I used to overcomplicate things a lot. And the further I, you know, the older I get, the more experienced I get, I'm always looking for what can we remove? How can we, I see my, almost see my job as a facilitator.

And then I'm trying to remove, you know, if you study conversion rate optimization, you're looking to remove friction. Well, I try and apply that mindset across the board. You're trying to remove friction in their processes on the way that they work on their website or update content. You're trying to remove friction for the end customer as they buy or understand the product. But to answer your question,

The product's very important and you understanding the product. And some of these can be complicated and it takes time to understand. And the only way you understand is by asking questions and not making assumptions. Because it's your job to then make that, if you can't explain it to, if you don't understand it, you can't explain it to others. So understanding that their products is very important.

Rana (14:37)
Got it. So while working on a website strategy, the first step is to understand business, overall business strategy, and understand the product or service. What else is needed to develop a winning website strategy?

Judd Lyon (14:50)
Yeah, so the strategy, the first thing is understanding the business and understanding the business and don't underestimate this. And this gets more and more important the larger the organization you're working with. So when you're with a smaller organization, this is pretty easy to figure out, but don't underestimate the human side of the equation. And one thing that I highly recommend is make sure that on

that someone is in charge of this project. There's a single point of contact.

I always insist that someone on the client side is responsible for making the final decision on.

how we can move forward.

Rana (15:25)
Yes, I agree. When we work with businesses as well, so if you're working with a marketing manager who understand the overall project, it's totally different than working with the founder who don't understand the technicalities of digital or SEO or other stuff. It's generally, as you mentioned, uphill battle. So this is a very important communication puzzle. And also, I think the businesses you are working with, there will be bureaucracy to...

for the approval processes and it can take lot of time and slow down the project a lot.

Judd Lyon (15:54)
Yeah, That's something that's been a learning process for me. I tend to be a little bit impatient. I like to work quickly. And I had a hard time earlier in my career understanding why things took so long. One thing to the clients, in the client's defense, there are things that we're not aware of that are happening in their business. There are things that may be happening politically. People come and go from organizations.

⁓ We're not privy to budget conversations. There may be new rollouts. There's all sorts of things that we may not know as we're providers trying to build the websites on the other end. So sometimes you just have to be patient. And at the end of the day, we're serving them and helping them bring their vision to life. And so one thing is you can't care more than the client. you have to go with...

An old advertising professor that I had said, if you see a great campaign, there was a great client there because someone had to approve that. there's this co, there's a, there's a, when you work on a great project, there's a co-creation process that you're making each other better and you bring the best out of each other. And that's when you see a fantastic website. It's usually the result of multiple people working in concert.

Rana (17:06)
I could not agree more. Successful website project is a team game. It's a team sport. So absolutely. So we got the business strategy right. We got the communication piece is there. We understand the products now. So how do you reflect all these things onto the website? So how do you start building a website now?

Judd Lyon (17:25)
Yeah, so in terms of my process, kind of have been workshopping an acronym that I like to call SMAC. And so the S actually stands for strategy and stakeholders. And that's what we kind of just discussed. The next thing that I like to move into, which is the ⁓ in the word SMAC, which is the market and messaging. So.

Not only understanding your client and their business and as you're talking to the stakeholders you should start to develop a clearer picture of who their ICP is, their ideal customer profile or who their market is. And then from there I like to work on the messaging. So sometimes my role, I'll have more say so there. Sometimes this has already been done or I'm collaborating with an agency but messaging is absolutely.

critical for websites and a very underrated. I had someone, I used to do a lot of user interface design and someone told me the most important part of any interface is the text. And sometimes we don't think of that. We think of the design, the visuals, the video, the graphics. But I've seen many websites and you can probably think of some yourself. mean, the classic example is Craigslist, but there's many, many examples.

of websites that look what we would think are ugly, but they get the messaging right. They solve a real problem and the messaging is clear and they have what somebody wants. So I really spend a lot of time thinking about, like to say that, you know, every page has a job and that messaging, you think about your, you know, your H1 or your headline and your subheading. I spend a lot of time thinking about page types.

and what the purpose of that page is. And I'm fairly ruthless about eliminating things that don't contribute. If a page or a page type is not doing its job, you fire it. So the is about the market and messaging. And sometimes the client will allow you to participate more in that process. Sometimes they've already got it nailed and they know what they're doing there. For me in B2B industrial stuff, don't

they're not spending tons of time and thought workshopping the messaging. this is somewhere I can help them articulate what they're trying to do here. But I would definitely spend time on the messaging. And then from there, as we talk about kind of how the process starts to flow, the A in SMAC stands for architecture and aesthetics. So this is when you get into information architecture. And this is where you're mapping out

you this is where you're doing, you're thinking about kind of the nature of the data that you're working with and how it needs to flow. And if you're a developer and you've worked on bigger things and worked on web applications, you know this, you're doing data modeling. But if you're building a smaller website, it's still useful to think about the types of pages that you're building, what kind of information is going to go on those pages and how can we have clear messaging? So information architecture on smaller sites, it's very straightforward. You kind of can just create a,

a tree of, yeah, create a site map, absolutely. On larger sites, you may end up going through some exercises ⁓ like a tree sort exercise, or you actually will invite feedback. Sometimes product lines get complicated, but yeah, you're go through the information architecture, map out the page types, map out what the navigation's gonna be, and all of this stuff is subject to change. Websites are not, we're not.

Rana (20:12)
site map Yeah.

Judd Lyon (20:35)
I had a friend that used to work in the semiconductor industry and if you get that process wrong when they're actually creating the silicon chips, millions and millions of dollars of mistakes and they have one shot to get it right. We're not doing that. We're making websites. These are living, breathing, dynamic things. I can't remember who said it, they say planning is everything, but plans are nothing.

It's like the planning process is what brings out the smart thinking here and you have to go through this process. A lot of this is going to change once the site's live and, but yeah, information architecture. So, mapping out, creating a clear site map. And then I also like to write, think about the page types themselves and start to think about mapping out. If you're going to use something like where you need some sort of custom fields or thinking about, know, we need a hero image here we need. So.

thinking about what those building blocks, and every CMS has a different nomenclature for this, but the process is the same. It's a universal process of breaking down the page types, the types of data or building blocks you're gonna use to construct that page, and what the message and purpose of that page is. from there, and so, know, we've been talking for a little while already here, and we haven't even got to the part that everyone immediately thinks of when you think websites, which is the visual design. And in my...

Rana (21:50)
Exactly.

Judd Lyon (21:51)
In my process, I call that aesthetics. So we're talking about the architecture. went, remember we started with the strategy. That's the most important piece, the strategy and stakeholders. And we get to the market and the messaging. So that we're communicating clearly. We map that to the architecture, which is your information architecture, site map, page types. And then, then we get to the part that everybody loves, which is the fun part, which is you start to do the visual design. So.

For me, typically that'll end up being, we'll go through a wire framing process where it's cheap and easy to make mistakes. And the tools nowadays are amazing. So, you like I mentioned, I've been around a long time. There's so many great tools for this. Find one that you like. There's not one that's clearly better than others. Just find the one that works for you. You know, if you want to use a notebook or a whiteboard, doesn't matter. The process is what's important. And then we get to the part where you go through the visual design.

Rana (22:23)
Exactly.

Judd Lyon (22:42)
And a good designer, know, my favorite designer that I really enjoy working with, the thing I appreciate about her the most is she does all of that homework leading up. She doesn't just dive right in and start, you know, creating beautiful designs in Figma. She focuses on the messaging, the page types, the strategy, and that's really design is in service of all of that. It's not its own thing. And sometimes we get that backwards in our industry.

where we wanna jump right into the beautiful design and then fill it in with content. That's backwards. The design exists to honor the content. And so you can tell when people get this backwards. So anyhow, I'll stop there. I could go through this entire thing. I love talking this stuff.

Rana (23:18)
you

No, no, no, I

enjoy it. I enjoyed all the details. And normally I explain this very important part, this strategy and pre-planning before you start development. I compare it to a house building process. So where you want to build a house, the strategy part is very important. Where you want to live, the neighborhood, and all those things are very important. And then once you have the land, don't start straight away building it. You start with architecture design.

Similarly, we do in a website. You decide architecture design, and then you develop. then static is the interior design. That's the end part. Can be changed, can be improved. But the importance is the strategy, how many bedrooms you need, how many bathrooms you need, what are your needs and stuff. Similarly, on a website, how many pages you need, because every page will need maintenance, improvement, love and care later on once you build. If you leave it.

It can hurt your site instead of adding value to the dead pages which you are not contributing to your success. So I fully agree on the strategy part.

Judd Lyon (24:27)
Yeah, and that's a great metaphor. mean, you wouldn't just run off and build a house without a blueprint. And then what type of house you build depends on who's going to live there. So if the people living in the house are elderly, you're going to design a house that's completely different than if it's a young family with a bunch of kids or, you know, so yeah, that's a wonderful metaphor. And it also is one that comes up if you're building websites for other people, the conversation about money.

It's also useful because everyone wants to know how much does a website cost? And it's kind of like, how much does a house cost?

Rana (24:56)
Exactly. Exactly. So

it depends on your needs and every website is different and different requirement. Fantastic. OK, so we got the strategy part right. Do you have any example recently you worked with recently or in your career you worked with a business where they come to you with a problem and you fix their strategy and how the strategy fixation helped them improve their business?

Judd Lyon (25:21)
Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things that all of us suffer from and I'm as guilty as anybody at this, which is kind of the curse of knowledge or, you know, some people will call it the the frog of the fog of war or but all of us are so immersed in our businesses that, you know, I also heard this described as you, you, you can't see the label when you're inside the bottle, which is

We have a hard time, we're so immersed in our business, in our jargon, and how the mechanics of our business, and we just, make this assumption, it's hard for us to put ourselves in the position of someone who doesn't understand our businesses as well as we do. And they're not as motivated to understand our businesses as much as we do. And so one of the things that I, you know, as I work with clients, I'm thinking of one in particular, I don't wanna, you know, single them out.

Rana (26:04)
Exactly.

Judd Lyon (26:13)
But as you sit on the early calls, the discovery calls, and kind of as you're kicking this process off on the, on the strategy, as they're explaining things, it's not clear exactly what they do. And one of the things that you'll find, especially when you're working with teams is that even within a company, there is a slightly different vision of what the company's doing. And so depending on who you're asking in the organization, you might get slightly different.

takes on what do you guys do? What's your number one product or what's your strategy heading forward? And, you know, we will wish this process was perfect, but this is the real world and the practical things are, is people have different views of how this works. So one of the things in this example, we had someone at various levels going, you know,

basically from someone who's doing the execution day to day and is in charge of marketing on up to people that are on the board. Part of what you need to do is make sure everyone's aligned before you move on to the next stage. And there might be a little bit of back and forth. There might be a few tense conversations. Sometimes this takes place on a call, like visually, like we're doing right now. Sometimes this can be in Slack. You need to figure out, you know,

I'm a fan of doing stuff in person or when you can see the other person because there's so many things that are hard to translate as you're sending ⁓ email or Slack messages or what have you. But yeah, really taking time to get alignment. And sometimes some of this may need to be done privately if people aren't in agreement, but getting alignment and just making sure before we move to the next stage, here's how we're gonna proceed. So.

Yeah, and an example I can think of, it was kind of bringing, trying to bring it together and get alignment and then document it. I'm a big fan of documentation and this is one of AI superpowers. And there's no excuse. There's no excuse nowadays not to document things. It's very easy to summarize things, to document things and to get that in front of everyone and don't make assumptions, just say, okay, here's what we're going to go with.

Is everyone clear on this and then moving it to the next stage? If you can't get agreement and sometimes people are just, you if you can't get, you're never going to have a complete a hundred percent alignment across the board. Sometimes it pays to remind people that websites are dynamic and we can change it later after launch if you really get hung up. So that's a little, that's a little technique or a tip there is if you do end up at an impasse, sometimes you can say, you know what?

Let's go with this. is a sensible way of doing this. And we can look at the analytics later, or we can workshop it a little bit more and change it.

Rana (28:41)
So I was trying to get the case study out of you. we were trying to get the, can you name like a business, not a business name, industry came to you where they had this problem. The teams were on a different vision and they were not aligned. And you fixed that part and how that resulted in a business success.

Judd Lyon (29:00)
Yes. So I want to be careful by how I describe them so they don't know exactly who I'm talking about. Yeah. So this was actually in the packaging industry as well. was in a their business is a hybrid business in that like a lot of these, sell parts or machinery, but then there's a service piece and a customer service piece on supporting the things that they sell. So

Rana (29:07)
You

Judd Lyon (29:28)
Yeah, you can't move forward and deliver a clear website without getting alignment. And once we had that alignment, we were able to proceed and the rest, once you get, and you know this, because you've worked on a lot of websites as well, once you get past that initial thing and you've got that alignment, the execution, once you get to a certain proficiency, is just.

It's just a matter of putting the work in and executing and doing the design, doing the development, doing the QA and getting the thing launched. So once we got past that, we were able to continue and we got an overhauled site launched and the feedback has been positive in terms of it's much more clear for the end customers. And then as we look at the analytics, there was an initial dip, which sometimes you can panic when you launch a new site and...

Rana (29:55)
Exactly.

Judd Lyon (30:13)
Obviously we made sure to do things like we had proper three-in-one redirects of the old content. We made everything mapped and we had a smooth launch. But initially there's a bit of a feeling out process for the new site to kind of take hold so to speak as it's being indexed or as visitors are getting oriented to coming back. But yeah, all of the indicators in terms of their organic traffic, their chat.

Rana (30:16)
Yeah.

Judd Lyon (30:39)
They have live chat and so their live chat conversations have increased. But yeah, the things they use to measure their form fills, those are typically the things that we look at as the kind of KPIs or key performance indicators that we measure are the number of forms that are filled out. The other thing that was important for them was enhancing their internal search. And we put analytics in place to track what.

people were searching for in their internal search bar. And then one thing from there is now we can see what people are actually looking for. We can use that data. That's great data, by the way, for anyone out there who's got an internal site search, you should set up your analytics to track that. And it's something that once you have that data, you can then either adjust your search results or you can actually

bias to search results that if you know someone's looking for a particular part or a particular solution, you can program it to put messaging in front of them that's more relevant and solves their problem quicker and easier. So yeah, that's one example that springs to mind is a case study that once we got that alignment, make sure everyone kind of was singing from the same hymn book, the rest was kind of smooth sailing.

Rana (31:42)
Amazing. So what I understood is you identified the messaging issues, misalignment of the messaging. You implemented your strategy to fix the message, sort out the website pages, alignments, align all those pages, and publish it, which improved all business metrics which business were looking to improve. Is that right?

Judd Lyon (32:02)
Yeah, that's correct. And one of the things that's very satisfying and also can be a little nerve wracking in this industry is that we all get a report card at some point because we can measure all of this. And so one thing that's important is not to panic when you have to zoom in and zoom out frequently in this industry that

You know, if things aren't going well for a few days or a few weeks or sometimes even a few months, if you've made sound decisions and stuck to the fundamentals, you're really trying to play, you know, in most cases, you're trying to play the long game and you're, and you're trying to think along the life of this website. so yeah, try not to fall. Yeah.

Rana (32:39)
I agree. Yeah, I agree.

I'm going through a couple of important decision-making process, important projects at the moment, very old side, maybe 30 years old site, but architecture is not right. So those are scary decisions to make, get the pages aligned, which have had the backlinks and important pages. So these are all important and scary changes. And as you said, when we will do this change, there are danger of the traffic initially goes down. if eventually it should be

Judd Lyon (32:57)
Right. Right.

Rana (33:08)
for the betterment of the customer if you do it properly. But I totally agree. These are the scary decisions for us to suggest to the customers.

Judd Lyon (33:17)
Yeah, and you have to be honest, earlier in my career and something that is I've done it more and more is I like to be, I've always been transparent, but I'm much more willing to say, I don't know to questions when someone asks me. My view is that I don't have all the answers. I would never pretend to have all the answers, but I have good questions. I've developed good questions over the years and those are more important because really you want to lead your client to the right answers that they arrive at.

because at the end of the day, this is their business. And one of the things that you have to be willing to do, I think it makes sense to think of all these things as experiments and we're making a hypothesis and we're testing it and sometimes they don't work out and that's okay. The tendency is to try and paint over it or panic and mistakes happen. I've broken websites in every way imaginable and you know what, when that happens?

you work hard to remedy the issue and you be honest about, this didn't work or we thought this would happen and it didn't. So what do we do? you'll earn, good clients will respect that. And not only do you not have to remember or try and like, know, paint over it, but this is, it builds trust and you need trust and you need honesty to win.

long term and that's really the name of the game and what we're all trying to do.

Rana (34:32)
Absolutely. we are dealing with hundreds of data points, hundreds of things on the website. And we are working with our customers for five, 10 years now, long-term customers. I call it that we are in a transformational relationship with them. So we are not there just for the good days. We are there when we make mistakes. so there will be mistakes because

Every day is a new day in our industries, but we don't run away with mistakes. We own the mistakes. We fix the mistakes. That's our guarantee. our guarantee is that we are with them on the right direction. are their growth partners. So this is our direction. If they are not growing, we are not growing. We are in a dangerous zone. So that's the guarantee. And everything in between, we are learning. So what we have learned, they are getting benefit out of it.

Judd Lyon (35:00)
Yeah, 100%.

Yeah.

Rana (35:20)
we

are trying to learn, will, on the course of our journey, they will get benefit of it.

Judd Lyon (35:26)
Couldn't agree more. And this is such a dynamic field. That's part of what makes it so exciting. But it's a moving target. I mean, even when you have a website that's in a maintenance phase and you're not actively making a lot of changes to, the web server is still receiving patches. There are vulnerabilities being released. There may be something, you know, we've all had the big cloud flare outages. mean, there's upstreams of people, underwater, you know,

cables get snipped by big tankers or through, you know, whatever. I mean, there's just so many things. I always joke and I probably shouldn't in front of clients about this, but I'm like, it's a miracle computers work at all. If you knew, you know, the more I learn, the more I learn about how all this stuff works, it's incredible that it works as well as it does. So yeah, you just have to be accountable, have integrity, just own it. We're all in this, you know, we're all working together. We're all learning together.

Rana (35:54)
Exactly.

You

Judd Lyon (36:20)
And as long as, my experience has been is that 99 % of clients appreciate that and respect that and they make mistakes as well. And all they want is someone who's responsive. That when something does break or go wrong, that they feel that you are reliable and that they can get in touch with someone quickly and that you let them know.

I'm on it. I'm going to, you know, we've, we've got someone on it. If you've got a team or in my case, it's, it's typically just me and I would say I'm taking a look at it. Here's what I know. Here's what I'm unsure of. I'll let you know as soon as I, and then be proactive about providing, you know, updates and status. Nobody likes to have to chase somebody down.

Rana (36:59)
Communication is the key in our experience. So you should own it if something goes wrong. If you try to blame other people and ask the responsibility, that's where a client can. We all can sniff all these things, whether you're taking responsibility or you're trying to hide away when a problem arises. So this is the key. Got it.

Judd Lyon (37:16)
Yeah, one thing before

we move on, sorry, this is super important and something that I think I've seen, I mentioned I've done a lot of web development work and I've seen developers or highly technical people do this before. Do not take advantage of the fact that the client does not understand the technology like you do. And when something breaks,

Don't blame somebody else or misrepresent what happened. Obviously you need to explain it in a way that they can understand and they don't need to, you you don't need to get into the weeds about some NGINX configuration or whatever. But just be honest. And if you don't know, it's fine to say you don't know and you're looking to find out in the public relations world when there's a crisis. They use what are called holding statements. And a holding statement is basically acknowledging that there's an issue.

and you're holding place until you can find more information. And so you'll see this when you notice like when a disaster something happens, they'll say, we're aware of an incident, we're looking into it, we're proactively doing X, Y, and Z and we will provide an update tomorrow at, and then you go find out what's happened. But don't ever try and confuse clients or hit them with lots of jargon when something goes wrong. Just be honest and own it and it benefits everyone.

Rana (38:20)
Exactly.

Exactly. They don't know the technology, but they are running a business. They know how business runs and when someone is talking sense and when someone is not making sense. So very solid advice on this part. And I loved you. You mentioned that you claim that you have broken website, anything imaginable. So I would love to ask your favorite mess up if you would like to share, which we can avoid maybe.

Judd Lyon (38:53)
yes.

Yeah, I am. I've made many. One good one. This was a very long time ago. This was many, many years ago. And I'm going to date myself. Some people who've been working on websites for a long time will laugh. Google Website Optimizer was a platform that Google used to offer that was for

conversion rate optimization. So you could set up tests to test, you know, what color button converts higher if you've got an e-commerce shop or what have you. And so I was very sold. I was working at an early stage startup. This is when I lived in Austin, Texas, a long time ago. And I convinced the founder of the startup that it was a video startup. So we had educational videos that were for sale. It was really kind of ahead of its time, but anyway, it was a venture backed startup.

We had this video platform, had hundreds of educational videos and the conversion action was, you know, you know, buying credits or buying the, purchasing the video. so Google Web, Webmaster, no, not Google Webmaster. was a website optimizer, GWL. It just come out and I convinced him that we needed to do this. We needed, we needed to test all our conversions. And I said,

Rana (39:57)
⁓ yeah.

Judd Lyon (40:05)
I'm not sure. And I said, no, this is, if we do this, it can increase our conversion and it'll increase, you know, I mapped out the math. This little incremental improvement could drive a bunch of revenue. They said, okay. So it was not super clear how to implement this. And this was a Ruby on Rails application. We had a team of developers. I was not on the development team, actually. I was doing like email marketing and those sorts of things. So I convinced them, we've got to do this. Here's what we need to test. We'll roll it out.

we roll it out and our two developers had gone to a Ruby conference in Las Vegas. And so they were out in Las Vegas at this conference and we had just deployed this on like a Thursday afternoon, Friday afternoon sort of thing. And by the way, never deploy on Fridays if you don't have to, cause that'll ruin your.

Rana (40:48)
We don't

launch a site on Fridays. That's learned hard.

Judd Lyon (40:51)
Yeah, yeah, it's bad.

Yeah, bad karma. So anyway, we roll out this huge thing. There were 2,500 video pages. And I got my recommendation wrong on how you implement it to the developers. And so I woke up to a bunch of emails of help. The website, all 2,500 videos on our website are.

301ing to the wrong, to broken URLs, because we were trying to swap out a test, one URL versus the other and compare which one got the lift or what have you. So this totally botched rollout, just 2,500 URLs, the entire website is just jacked. Well, the developers were out in Las Vegas and they were out late at night and they were out having fun and they were heading into the weekend in their conference.

Rana (41:17)
Yeah,

Judd Lyon (41:36)
And so they were unavailable. We couldn't get in touch with them quickly. And so I had to spend, you know, Friday sitting there with everyone looking at me like, you know, to the credit of the founder. And we ended up getting ahold of the developers eventually. They were furious with me because they're like, you know, we broke 2,500 URLs. The whole, the whole sites, you know, come to a screeching halt. The founder, thankfully, was such a wonderful guy. He was, he teased me about it for years after that where he would say, oh yeah, what about the, uh,

What about your, how's your A-B testing going, Judd? I was like, sorry. It seemed like a good idea, but it was a little early. The technology was a little immature and I didn't understand how to recommend it being implemented. So yeah, I brought that whole business to a halt for pretty much a full business day.

Rana (42:05)
Optimize it.

Did you fix it later on? Did you manage to try it or you just?

Judd Lyon (42:22)
Yeah,

the developers got fixed. We didn't end up running the A-B test. We just scrapped the whole thing, but that was a good one. Another one that I made a big mistake is on an e-commerce website. This one was super embarrassing. I'll keep this one quick. This is back in the day. I had installable software on the web server. I used to do a lot of DevOps and server stuff, and so I had to recompile PHP.

And so there's all these packages you have to make sure you include when you rebuild the server. And this was an e-commerce business doing a lot of money every day. And basically I forgot to include a package that allowed for the credit card processing to work properly. So I got a call in a meeting that

hey, we're capturing orders. And I had tested the website ordering process, but I wasn't putting in real credit cards or trying to run real orders. is pre, know, Stripe has solved this now, but anyway, I got a call that all of the orders, they had captured 35 orders that morning, but not one of them had gone through. And it was because I didn't compile this package on the server. So the credit card platform didn't work and they had to spend two weeks reaching out to every single customer.

to get them on the phone, to take their credit card over the phone to make sure their order works.

Rana (43:33)
Yeah. Anyways, the main reason

for these mess-ups was to what were the lessons you learned from these, which people, we can avoid with these mess-ups.

Judd Lyon (43:41)
Yeah, so

Yeah,

so one, it goes back to what we were just talking about, about being accountable. didn't, I didn't, you know, I was clearly responsible. I apologize. The other thing was I made my, I dropped everything I was doing and you know, immediately, I dismissed myself. I was in an important meeting. I, you know, I left. So the speed to response is critical. Accountability is critical. Those are, those are definitely learnings you can take out of this. The other thing too is, is making sure

Rana (43:58)
Yeah.

Judd Lyon (44:11)
ahead of time that you have a plan in place. I did not have a great plan in place. This was much earlier in my career for having contingencies for what happens when things go wrong. And this is incredibly important as you move up and work on bigger and more complex systems. And they have things like, you know, who gets paged, who's on call, you know, there's a whole site reliability engineering is a whole field, but having a plan before something goes wrong in terms of

Who's gonna get alerted? How quickly of a response time can the client or does the website require? And if that person's not available, they call it the bus factor. If someone gets hit by a bus. I don't like that one, cause it's so terrible. A better one I heard recently was someone said, what if he's scuba diving? So like, what someone's totally like unavailable? Just have those plants in place, because when these happen, they're very stressful and you're not thinking clearly.

Rana (44:56)
Much better.

Judd Lyon (45:01)
and you can get wound up. So if you have a clear plan, please say, ⁓ it's happening. Here's what we're gonna do. Here's who needs to get alerted. Here's who can fix it. In mine, the mistake I made was the developers were unavailable and the way we planned it out was not smart and that was on me because it was my project.

Rana (45:13)
Exactly.

Yeah, biggest lesson, never deploy major updates on Friday. ⁓ So that's the biggest one. OK, we spend most of our time on discussing strategy, particularly for manufacturing businesses. What are the common one or two things which manufacturing businesses get wrong when it comes to strategy?

Judd Lyon (45:21)
No, never.

⁓ But a few of the things that they typically get wrong and they're getting better as people are expecting more from websites and wanna have more of this process happen on the website.

or increasingly in LLMs, we're seeing that happen a lot where people are doing product research in LLMs. But one of the things they get wrong is there's not a lot of thought. The website is something that a lot of times is an afterthought or a secondary piece. Granted, this is changing and they're getting much better at this. But they treated the website as something that they throw over the fence to their agency. And that's kind of like,

the marketing piece, whereas really when it's done right, it can be a tool or an instrument that can help facilitate the business. the smart ones, the ones that they get wrong is to treat it as a, you know, as a brochure or as a secondary thing. The ones that get it right, treat it as a tool and they may build things like a partner portal or, you know, having gated content and resources and

What we're seeing in the analytics is that a lot of buyers want to self-serve. And so they don't want to get on the phone call with a salesperson. Some of this is generational, but some of this is just as the tools have gotten better. And a lot of people are doing research in LLMs now is by the time they get to the website, they already have an idea of what they want to do. And your job is to get out of their way and let them do it and not try and force them into some sort of sales funnel or call someone or whatever. And it's to give them.

the tools they need to quickly get what they want.

Rana (47:01)
Amazing. again, this is lot of work, how AI can, in your opinion, help manufacturing businesses with getting their website strategy ready.

Judd Lyon (47:11)
Yeah, so as I mentioned, I'm very cautiously optimistic and I would say, bullish on AI. It really is a sea change. I was around kind of in the early web, which was kind of revolutionary technology. And then I lived through the mobile, was obviously a huge game changer. And now AI is also in that category of just

It's a sea change. It is a big deal, none of this is going to substitute human ingenuity, human creativity. So I am a big advocate of human in the loop. Don't trust wholesale what's coming out of these systems. But the way it can help...

A few things that it's really good at, particularly for manufacturers, is these are very information-dense products, and sometimes they're very complicated. There's a lot of engineering involved. And one of the things that LLMs are fantastic for are parsing through complicated or dense material and summarizing it. Or, and we're seeing this with kind of the momentum that the model context protocol MCP servers is making data that used to be hard to query and see.

making it very easy to query or get information from using natural language, the way we actually speak and think. So you can do things like, me all of the, I wanna look at all of the product manuals for XYZ product and show me all of them that have this particular piece or whatever. You can literally just say that type of thing. And if you've structured the data properly or fed it into whatever system you're using, it can return information.

But for your audience and people listening or watching, this is amazing when you're looking at things like your web analytics, when you're looking at, if you're going through your...

search engine rankings or if you're going through whatever data you're collecting that's important to your business, the ability to stitch these together and then query them with natural language is unbelievable. It helps you make better decisions faster. But I would just say human in the loop, human, always have a human in the loop and use your, use your judgment.

Rana (48:59)
Exactly.

Fantastic ⁓ suggestion, ⁓ Judd. And the last thing, what is the one action you can recommend for manufacturing? Because we focus on strategy and particularly for manufacturing businesses. Is there any one action or direction you can share for those people who are working on strategy to make their website their number one business growth tool?

Judd Lyon (49:30)
Yes, I think the number one thing to focus on would be to create feedback loops. So you would be shocked and I listened to your episode

and he shared a fantastic tip. my one tip is to build feedback loops into everything you're doing. And he shared a very powerful one. And you'd be surprised how many manufacturing companies do not do this. They have a silo between marketing and sales. Your salespeople are the front lines interacting with customers and learning what works, what messaging works, what objections happen, all those things.

That is gold for your website. So working with sales and creating a feedback loop, a virtuous cycle of gathering that feedback, that real time feedback from the field and working that back into your messaging, your copy, those sorts of things. So feedback loops every step of the way.

Rana (50:21)
Amazing. Yeah, fantastic advice. And I think, as you said, we will run short of time because there is so much to learn from you. And I today only focused on strategy. I would love to maybe have a separate episodes with you going into development and after that optimization or performance or promotion of manufacturing websites here.

Judd Lyon (50:22)
That would be my number one tip.

Anytime, I'll talk about this. Anytime, any day, you let me know. I really enjoyed it.

Rana (50:47)
No,

no, definitely we need to organize that part. So today's basically the main message is the 80-20 rule is that if you spend time on strategy getting that right, that can produce 80 % of your website results. that how we can summarize today's conversation?

Judd Lyon (51:07)
Yes, sir, the good old Pareto principle is that you can get outsized returns by focusing on that front end of the process, which is your strategy and your messaging. If you get that right, the rest of the things kind of take care of themselves.

Rana (51:22)
Brilliant, Judd Where people who are looking to build manufacturing websites, if they want to connect or learn from you more, what is the best place to connect with you?

Judd Lyon (51:30)
Yeah, the best place, connect with me on LinkedIn. So it's Judd, Lyon, J-U-D-D-L-Y-O-N. I'm trying to be more active there and figure out how to connect with folks and share my learnings as I'm going through this journey. I'm still learning. I'm 20 plus years into this, but I'm still learning new stuff every day and trying to share with others and learn from others there. So that's a good place and I'll always have that up to date with my website and newsletter and all those things. So I'm really trying to be more active.

So LinkedIn is the answer.

Rana (51:59)
Amazing, Judd. Thank you so much for your time and sharing very generous responses to my questions. So I think this will be helpful for people who are looking to build manufacturing websites.

Judd Lyon (52:11)
Absolutely, I'm happy to be here and I appreciate you putting pretty good information out there and helping folks with their use their websites for growth.

Rana (52:19)
Really appreciate it. Thank you so much and hopefully we see you very soon.

Judd Lyon (52:22)
Take care.