The quote starts with a file, and your website will not take one.
Fabrication quoting starts with a file. Max thickness, bed size, brake tonnage, alloys and finishing decide whether a job is even possible before anyone talks about money. The shop that publishes its limits and takes a drawing gets the quote request nobody else sees.
They arrive with a drawing, and your contact form asks for a message.
Three things that make this trade its own problem
The drawing has nowhere to go
The buyer already has a DXF or a PDF print in his hand. A message box means every single inquiry needs a phone call and an email chain before it can be priced, and the fast quotes win the work.
Your limits are the qualifying content
Max thickness, sheet size, brake tonnage, which alloys you run, what finishing you do in house, whether your welders are coded. Publish them and the jobs you cannot take stop arriving in the first place.
Steel moves, so nothing can be priced on the page
Material cost changes between the quote and the PO, which rules out published pricing entirely. The whole site has to be built around quoting, and most are built like a brochure with a phone number at the bottom.
Quote it the same afternoon and the production run comes back
In fabrication, hit rate follows how fast the estimate leaves the office more than it follows the number on it. A buyer with a print out to three shops gives the work to whoever answered first and sounded certain about it. And the prize is never the one-off bracket. It is the part he needs four hundred of every quarter, because once your fixture exists and the first article passed, nobody wants to re-qualify a new shop to save a few cents.
Type your name in. Watch it become yours.
Switch the device. Change the theme. Type a business name below and the mini-site updates live — this is what it looks like for metal fabrication & welding.
↑ Yours would use your name, your colors, on every phone, tablet and desktop.
Where we would start
- Website DevelopmentEquipment and capability pages with real numbers on them, and a quote request as the main action on the site rather than a Contact link in the corner.→
- Forms, Portals & AutomationsA quote form that accepts DXF, STEP and PDF prints and asks material, gauge, quantity and finish, so the estimator opens something he can work from.→
- SEOProcess and material pages by region — laser cutting, press brake forming, stainless, aluminum, structural steel — which is how the search actually gets typed.→
- Business AutomationQuote follow-up and job status notifications, so estimates stop going quiet in an inbox and the customer stops ringing to ask where his parts are.→
Local or national — where this one is actually decided
Regional, and the boundary is truckable distance for anything heavy. There is a national layer on top of it for a niche capability, but only if the site states the capability precisely enough for someone to search it.
Work the number out before you spend anything
What is the admin costing you?. Free, no sign-up, and the answer is yours whether or not you ever call us.
Open the tool
Tell us what your customers search for
Describe the inquiries you want more of and the ones you would rather stop getting. You will get a straight read on what would actually move it, from the person who would do the work.