Rebuilding the Web Presence of a Process-Safety Company
Soter Software, the company behind HAZOP Edge, needed a website that matched how their buyers actually think. I migrated them off WordPress, rebuilt the information architecture around the way process-safety engineers evaluate software, and handed them a Wix site their marketing team could run without a developer.
This ran in parallel with the HAZOP Edge MVP work I was leading at Soter Safety Consulting. Same company, two outputs at the same time: a product platform their customers could trust, and a marketing site that could actually represent the company behind it. The website was the lighter brief, less complex than the SaaS work, but its impact compounded the product, because every prospect now landed in the right place before the demo.
A WordPress site that under-sold a serious product
Soter Software is a process-safety software company. Their customers are engineers, facility managers, and senior safety leaders inside high-hazard industries. The existing WordPress site read like a brochure: a long homepage, a thin About page, and a Products page that listed features without explaining who they were for or how teams would use them.
Two compounding issues. First, the information architecture did not match how engineering buyers evaluate process-safety software, so visitors bounced before they understood the product. Second, every content change needed a developer, so the marketing team couldn't keep the site current with the product roadmap.
A site that maps to how engineering buyers actually evaluate
I rebuilt the information architecture around six top-level sections, each answering a specific question a process-safety buyer brings to the site. Inside the Products page, HAZOP Edge is organised by the four user personas who'd touch it day to day, so a Project Manager and a Senior Manager each see the parts that matter to them, without scrolling past the other.
I delivered it inside Wix, hand-building every page, the navigation, and the responsive behaviour, so Soter's team was left with a site they could update themselves. No more developer tickets to change a value-prop or add a knowledge article.
Six questions, six sections
The old WordPress site had a navigation built around the company's internal view. The new structure mirrors the questions engineering buyers actually bring to a process-safety vendor, in the order they bring them.
- 01HomeWhat does this company do?
- 02AboutWho's behind this, and can I trust them?
- 03ProductsWhat does HAZOP Edge do, and is it for me?
- 04Knowledge CentreHow do these people think about safety?
- 05FAQsWhat's the catch, what does it cost, how does it deploy?
- 06ContactI'm in. How do I talk to a human?
Each section earns its place by answering one question. The Knowledge Centre, in particular, was a deliberate addition. Buyers in process safety read before they buy, and giving them a place to read built credibility before any sales conversation.
A product page that speaks to four people at once
HAZOP Edge is used by four very different people on the same study. The old page listed features in one long flow, leaving each persona to find their own relevance. The rebuilt Products page is structured by user role, so each visitor finds their own job described in their own language within the first scroll of their section.
Facilitators & Scribes
Set up workshops, document decisions, cut manual rework.
Team Members
Access studies, collaborate live, see risks in context.
Project Managers
Real-time dashboards, bottleneck visibility, consolidated insights.
Senior Management
Risk trend visibility, data-driven decisions, compliance evidence.
The structure also gave Soter's sales team a much cleaner share artefact. Instead of sending a deck after a call, they could drop a single persona-anchored section into a follow-up email and trust that the prospect would land on the part of the product that mattered to them.
A site the marketing team owns
Wix wasn't the most fashionable choice, and it wasn't meant to be. Soter Software needed a CMS their team could run without a developer in the loop. I hand-built each page inside Wix, including the navigation, the responsive behaviour, and the editorial templates the team would use to publish new Knowledge Centre articles.
A site that does the work the product can't
The new site does three things the WordPress one couldn't. It shows the company's thinking before it pitches the product. It speaks to each of the four HAZOP Edge personas in their own language. And it gives marketing direct ownership of the surface, so the site can move at the speed of the roadmap rather than the speed of a developer queue.
What this project taught me
The biggest move was admitting that the website's job is not to describe a product, it's to translate it into the buyer's own framing. Process-safety engineers don't evaluate software the way developers evaluate APIs. They want to understand the people, the philosophy, and the proof before they look at features. Reordering around their evaluation sequence did more for the site than any visual redesign would have.
The Wix decision was unpopular with the parts of the design world that grade tools by prestige. It was the right call here. Soter's team is small and fast, and they needed a surface they could run themselves. A custom build would have looked better in a portfolio and worked worse in the business. Choosing the boring tool was the design decision.
