Conn-Weld Industries
A WordPress site for a West Virginia manufacturer of vibrating screens and separation equipment. We designed and built it in 2019, then hosted, maintained, and grew it alongside their team until they moved to a new agency in early 2023.
Our work 2019–2023 · no longer maintained by us
Conn-Weld Industries, LLC · Princeton, West Virginia
WordPress
Design, development, hosting, ongoing maintenance
The challenge
Conn-Weld custom-builds vibrating screens, sieves, centrifuges, and replacement parts for coal, aggregate, water treatment, and food processing operations, sold through district managers across the United States and representatives overseas. The product line is deep, the buyers are engineers and plant managers, and every sale starts with a conversation about a specific operation. In 2019 the team wanted a site that could carry the whole line and start that conversation well.
What we built
A WordPress build, staged privately for the Conn-Weld team to review page by page and launched in July 2019. Every product line got its own page, from banana screens and dewatering screens to centrifuges and screen media, alongside a team page, a news section, and a resource center for downloadable files. Specification tables from the company’s own documents were rebuilt as web tables, and the contact page was built around a map Conn-Weld’s own team made.
From a PDF to a sizing form
Sizing a Hydro-Sieve starts with a customer’s process data, and that used to arrive on a PDF. We turned it into a step-by-step web form that is easy to fill out on a phone. Conn-Weld’s sieve engineer asked for one more question: does the job need grizzly bars? Finding that out after sizing meant recalculating the screen’s open area from scratch, so we added it to the form before launch.
Four years of care
After launch we hosted the site and kept it running, with a care report every month covering updates, backups, uptime, traffic, and speed. A typical month near the end, December 2022, logged 18 plugin and theme updates, 104 backups, and 100 percent uptime. When the company’s Russian sales office reported the site would not load there, we traced it to the firewall’s automatic geographic blocking.
The site kept growing with the business. In 2021 we refreshed the homepage and product pages around new photography and video, made color updates, and produced vector and print versions of the logo. In 2022 we added a careers page with an online employment application, kept the team page current, and added new equipment videos.
Handing it off
In early 2023 Conn-Weld partnered with a marketing agency for a new site, and we wrapped up our work, helping arrange the transfer of their online employment application to the new account. The site in this case study is no longer online. The image above is rebuilt from the Internet Archive’s July 2022 capture, using the site’s own copy, photography, and colors.