Tips & Tricks
Build your website to sell your waterjet services
Creating or updating a website to promote your shop’s waterjet services is a great and inexpensive way to advertise. With a little know-how and some experimentation, you can put together a great looking website that demonstrates your skills with your waterjet.
Basic Hosting and Building
Several website building and hosting sites offer easy-to-use, step-by-step site creation. Some of the easiest and most accessible include:
- Squarespace - Squarespace makes it extremely easy to get going quickly with your website, with striking designs that work particularly well with bold photography. The company also offers a number of tools that make sites easy to maintain.
- WordPress - WordPress does what you design it to do – and you can code it to do nearly anything. The biggest drawback is being overwhelmed and not knowing what you need to get started, which makes it a better option for more experienced users.
- Wix - Wix’s website builder is very simple in its design and somewhat cheaper than Squarespace’s equivalent services. After signing up, the company will send training emails to help you build your website, an especially useful service for less experienced web designers.
All three of these one-stop-shop options cost roughly $15 to $30 a month and typically include hosting and a domain name.
What to Include
Depending on what industry you serve, or plan to service, you will want to tailor your website design accordingly. For example, if you are primarily fabricating custom metal parts for automotive applications, you may want to use fonts and images that resonate with your customers. The background of your website is a good place to start – a city skyline would be a good choice for a shop specializing in architectural metal and glass, while a busy refinery will be an excellent backdrop for a manufacturer working in the oil and gas industry.
Abrasive waterjet is not the most widely understood technology. Because of that, you’ll likely want to add a section explaining what a waterjet is and how it works. Consider linking to a few OMAX pages to help explain this:
Below is a short explanation of waterjet technology:
The OMAX abrasive waterjet utilizes a high-pressure stream of water and abrasive garnet to erode a narrow line in the stock material. Since the machine uses a cold cutting product, no head-affected zones like those caused when cutting with laser or plasma. Waterjet can cut nearly any material available, including titanium, marble, G10, etc.
Rather than the example materials listed above, list of materials that your shop specifically cuts. For many job shops, the versatility of the waterjet is what keeps them in work, don’t leave any material off your list that you anticipate will come through your door. On the flip side, if you are not interested in working with a specific material for whatever reason, don’t list it.
If you have specific capabilities that set your business or your waterjet cutting apart, you should mention those. For example, waterjet users with an A-Jet can cut bevels and more advanced geometries. OMAX users with a Rotary Axis can cut piping. Vacuum Assist makes cutting laminates easier and cleaner.
Post Images
You can tell your potential clients how great you are and what you can do all day long but showing them will make a much bigger impact. Make sure you customers are okay with you showing off their finished pieces on your website, take picture of parts cut on your waterjet. Some machined pieces may not look too exciting, but it may be what your next potential customer needs to see before closing the deal.
Additionally, you may want to show off your waterjet. Since the concept of waterjet cutting is often unfamiliar, your potential customers might want to see the machine to understand what it is. If you are looking to add images of your OMAX to your website, there are several available on our Customer Dashboard. There is also a full set of logos and other materials that may be useful under the “Digital Assets” tab in the sidebar.
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