Who was this for, and what did they need to believe?
Zhicheng Bio exports amino acids and botanical extracts. Its buyers are purchasing managers at US supplement brands and contract manufacturers. They do not want a story; they want to know three things in the first screen: do you have the product, is it in the US, and will a human answer today. Everything on the site was ranked by whether it helped answer one of those.
Why did the catalogue come before the home page?
Because that is where the buyer goes. We built the 58 product pages first, each from the real specification sheet — assay, mesh, test method — and only then designed the home page as a window onto them. It also set the tone: a site that shows its spec sheets looks like a supplier, not an agency.
What did “bilingual” actually mean?
Not a translate button. Two full sets of pages, English written for a US reader and Chinese written for a domestic one, with hreflang so Google serves the right one. Prices, stock and forms are shared; the copy is not. The English was checked against how competitors in the US actually describe the same molecules.
How do you make a stock table believable?
You put it on the home page, you date it, and you keep it current. The US-warehouse table lists what is physically in the US versus what is in transit — a distinction the sales team asked us to make explicit after buyers kept assuming “in transit” meant “available”. Two quote forms (one general, one from the product page) go to the same inbox.
What about search — and the AI assistants?
The research pages answer questions buyers type into Google and, increasingly, into ChatGPT-style assistants: what a given extract does, at what dose, with which certificates. We added the structure those assistants read (short answer blocks, an llms.txt, entity-consistent naming) so the site can be cited, not just ranked.
What would we do differently?
Photograph the factory earlier. The scroll-through tour on the home page went live with AI concept images first; the real footage came later and converted better the day it landed. We now ask for photos in the brief, before design starts — it became one of our eight rules.