starchem
Six years with a South Carolina specialty-chemicals manufacturer — a WordPress site built in weeks and grown for years, an eight-family product catalog with its safety and technical data sheets one click away, trade-show graphics by market, and a performance rescue that took mobile speed from 8 to 96.
CLIENT
StarChem
INDUSTRY
SERVICES
Full Spectrum
TIMELINE
Long (6+ months)
THE BRIEF
one chemistry company, five markets, and a website that had to serve all of them.
StarChem makes specialty chemicals in Wellford, South Carolina — surfactants, quats, silicones, softeners, intermediates — for customers as different as a textile mill, a detergent formulator, a personal-care brand, and an oilfield service company. The first brief was fast: a new website, live in weeks, that could speak to each of those markets and hand a lead straight to the sales team's CRM. What followed was six years of the site becoming the company's working front door — a full product catalog with every safety and technical data sheet, trade-show graphics, the small weekly asks, and, when Google's speed bar moved, a rebuild under the hood to clear it.
WHAT WE DID
01
the site
- Built the StarChem website on WordPress in a matter of weeks — a video hero, the quality policy, and a market grid that walks a visitor to Textiles & Nonwovens, Chemical Intermediates, HI&I, Personal Care, Oil & Gas, and later Custom Manufacturing — and set up the company's first brand guidelines around its existing mark: logo usage, palette, and type on one page, so everything after it matched.
- Wired the site into the sales stack from day one: live chat, CRM-connected forms on every contact point, analytics and retargeting tags, and a documents area for the data sheets customers actually come for.
02
the catalog
- Built the product catalog as a system — eight product families, StarQuat to StarSurf, each with its own page per product, structured from the technical data sheets so a buyer can compare grades rather than read a brochure.
- Embedded three live document libraries — general documents, SDSs, and TDSs — so every sheet stays current at the source and the site never carries a stale PDF, and carried the ™ marks across the catalog when the trademarks came through.
03
the show and the print
- Designed the trade-show booth — a backdrop under Creating Better Chemistry and a set of side banners, one per market (general, home-industrial-institutional cleaning, oil & gas) — so the same stand could face a different audience at each show.
- Kept the site's graphics current with the business: an events page for the show calendar, a global-footprint map of plants and markets served, and the news and presentation updates a growing company keeps sending.
04
the tune-up
- When the site started failing Core Web Vitals in its sixth year, rebuilt the foundation rather than the design — a new server, a PHP upgrade, updated theme and plugins, a transactional-mail service, and the document libraries moved to lighter hosting.
- Took mobile PageSpeed from 8 to 96 and desktop from 33 to 84, GTmetrix from a C to an A, load time from 3.16 s to 1.21 s, and requests from 79 to 30 — same site, same content, measured before and after.
THE OUTCOME
a six-year front door — and a speed rescue in year six.
8 → 96
MOBILE PAGESPEED · DESKTOP 33 → 84, SAME SITE, SAME CONTENT
100%
GTMETRIX PERFORMANCE · GRADE C → A, LOAD TIME 3.16 s → 1.21 s
8
PRODUCT FAMILIES ONLINE · EVERY GRADE ITS OWN PAGE, SDS AND TDS ATTACHED
NEXT CHAPTER
is your website still the front door your sales team deserves?
Let's build it, wire it to your CRM, and keep it fast for years — not months.