Internal review — not published

Website revamp, v3

What changed, why, and the decisions that need your sign-off before any of it goes live.

Open index.html in this folder to see the new homepage, then solutions.html. Everything works offline — no server needed. This document explains the thinking behind it; the pages themselves need no explanation to be read.

01Why we are rebuilding, not repainting

The old site was not badly made. The problem was that it described us in the order a company describes itself, rather than the order a customer arrives in. Five specific findings, all from the original pages:

Finding	Evidence in the original site
The palette contradicted itself	The stylesheet comments called #f0067b "copper". It renders as magenta. Magenta on plum, with gradient glows, is the default visual language of generated landing pages — it reads as "startup", not "engineers".
One claim, made six times	"We connect you, you decide" appeared in the hero, the why-section, all six service cards, the network intro, the process intro and the CTA. 929 words, no new information per section.
No evidence	Zero client names, zero project shapes, zero timelines, zero artefacts. The only numbers sat in a counter band with no context.
Content hidden behind JavaScript	Every card was opacity: 0 until a scroll observer fired. No JS, no scroll, or a print — blank sections.
Placeholders were public	Three testimonial cards reading "Client name pending approval" were live on the homepage.

None of that is fixed by choosing a nicer font. So the rebuild had four rules.

02The four rules

1. Problem before capability. A buyer arrives with something broken, not with a wish to browse services. The page should let them recognise their own situation first.
2. Evidence over adjectives. Named people, real cities, counted suppliers, specific numbers. Where we have no evidence, we say so rather than write around it.
3. One accent, one voice. Warm paper, graphite, and a single oxide accent drawn from the warm end of the logo. The pink now lives only inside the brand mark, on the dark masthead and footer.
4. Every claim checkable. "Ask them yourself" beats "trusted partner". No claim on the page should require believing us.

03What changed — homepage

The structure moved from capabilities → industries → proof to problem → who → network → diagnose → where we've shipped → how we work → contact.

Then	Now
Hero with a city skyline and no proof	Same hero and same headline, plus a proof strip under the buttons: 2 partners · 45 years · 4 contract manufacturers · 20+ sub-suppliers · Shenzhen–Heßdorf
"Why Eastbound Link" — five pain-point questions and a workbench photo	A "Who you're talking to" block: two named people, their domains, their numbers, and one honest limit
Six service cards	A twelve-symptom diagnostic, grouped into the six service areas
Stats band reading 45+ / €72M / 20+ / 64	Numbers attached to the person they belong to, not floating in a strip
"One connection to a wider network" — six card grids	A supplier ledger with real counts and cities, plus a schematic of where the sites are

The diagnostic

Twelve symptoms, two per service area, written the way a customer says them rather than the way we name the service. Picking one produces a structured answer: most likely · check first · cost to ignore — and never asks for an email. The answers are ours to rewrite; the structure is the point.

The network

Four contract manufacturers and eleven named sub-suppliers, by capability and city. Presented as a ledger with a schematic, not a world map with glowing arcs — and with the line that matters: "Every site on this page has been visited by one of us. None of it was pulled from a supplier directory."

04What changed — solutions page

Six services, each on the same pattern: a headline, one line of context, a four-or-five stage band splitting what you do from what we do, then the detail.

The "you do / we do" split is the most important idea on that page. It says plainly that the decisions stay with the customer and the execution is where we plug in. For a firm with no case studies yet, that honesty is worth more than any claim of expertise.

05What we deliberately did not do

• No invented clients. The placeholder testimonials are gone, and no case study was written to fill the gap.
• No borrowed photography. The pictures from our previous employers cannot be used, so the pages lean on typography and diagrams instead. A photo slot is reserved where evidence would help most.
• No new numbers. 45 years, €72M, 20+ products, −38% inventory, 72→94% OTIF all come from our own history. One inconsistency in the old site — a "30+" claim on the solutions page against "20+" elsewhere — was corrected to 20+ everywhere; tell me if 30+ is the real figure and I will move all of them.
• No change to the offer or the pricing. This is a communication rebuild.

06Decisions needed from you

07Known gaps

• No photography of our own work. The biggest remaining weakness. One photo of a review session and one of a marked-up drawing would do more than any copy change.
• The diagnostic answers are still generic in places. Structure is right, specifics need our experience.
• The solutions page is long — nine desktop screens. The jump nav mitigates it; a tighter version would cut the stage bands to three items each.
• About and contact pages carry the new visual language but still the old layout. Next on the list.

08How to review this in ten minutes

1. Open index.html. Read only the first screen. Does it tell you what we do and why to keep reading?
2. Scroll to Who you're talking to. Is the "ask them yourself" line something we can stand behind?
3. Click two symptoms in Pick what sounds familiar. Are the answers useful, or generic?
4. Open solutions.html and read the NPI band. Does the you/we split describe our work accurately?
5. Come back with the six decisions above.