Industrial Site Design

There are a lot of ways to find success with SEO, but my favorite approach has always been building microprojects. To me, a microproject is something you can create in a relatively short amount of time that instantly connects with your niche. These projects are birthed in the trenches, so they're impossible to outsource and even hard to brainstorm into existence. Rather, microproject ideas tend to catalyze when you're dealing with the same challenge for the umpteenth time and finally see a way to deal with it once and for all.
Years ago, when Figma didn't exist and flowcharts were hard to come by, I created Slickmap, a sitemap creation tool, to quickly convert simple lists into visual sitemaps. That's a microproject. While a great article can draw attention for awhile, a great microproject can become a permanent destination for your industry.
Our Latest Microproject
Astuteo specializes in industrial website design. We pay very close attention to the space. And yet our research into site design was a bit like scouring the forest for wild honey when we could be keeping beehives. What we really needed was:
- A structured method of exploring websites in our industry
- A process for uncovering common patterns and unique differentiators
- A sandbox to experiment with new technology like AI
- A better way to connect with new prospects and peers
Enter Industrial Site Design. Here's what we built and how it works:
Industrial Site Design
Industrial Site Design may look like just another website gallery, but that's only the foundation. For us, it's a centralized hub for researching over 30,000 manufacturing websites, all of which happen to be potential clients. In that sense, it's like a CRM turned inside out. And since we built it from scratch, the world's our oyster. Starting with a sample set of 1,500 websites, our initial build includes:
AI-Powered Custom Fieldtypes in Craft CMS
Selectable models from OpenAI and Anthropic are connected to long-form custom prompts and dynamic data, creating powerful automations.
Automatic Screenshot Capture
Screenshots are retrieved, hashed, and saved to AWS. Animation timing and pop-up windows can cause issues, so we've also created tools to tag errors.
Sitemap Retrieval and Processing
XML sitemaps are automatically processed in a way that allows us to analyze popular site structures and section titles across the entire catalog.
Industry Role Categorization (AI)
Companies are separated into five different categories determined by AI and its level of certainty. Sure things are automatically tagged, while the questionable are queued for manual moderation.
Technology Stack Detection
While it sucks to reinvent the wheel, existing tools are expensive and limited in license scope, so we built our own plugins for CMS discovery.
Digital Agency Detection (AI)
We use AI to determine if there's an agency link in the website footer and tag each site accordingly.
Social Media Detection
Similar to the agency tagger – but no AI required – we find and save the LinkedIn page and other social media for future connections
Admin Tools for Moderation and QA
Behind the scenes, we have 10+ custom tools for bulk editing, error discovery, and moderation.
Roadmap and Vision
What's next? We hope to:
- Add the remaining 30,000+ industrial companies
- Enable user accounts for industrial marketers to save favorites
- Build design agency profile pages
- Incorporate thought leadership from resident experts in their specialties
- Develop a way to explore specific site components
- Provide technology guides for common industry questions
- And much more!
We originally devised Industrial Site Design to be a tool for Astuteo, but the more it develops, the more we'd like to work with others to build a space where industrial marketing managers and design experts can connect and help one another. If that's you, don't hesitate to say hello.