- Agency:Intero Digital
- Client: Vodaland USA
- Category: Website Design — Manufacturing & Industrial
- Location: Colorado Springs, Colorado
- Project Brief: Build a gated engineering portal for a stormwater and drainage manufacturer that lets four professional audiences self-serve CAD files, load ratings, submittal packages, and installation documentation without a sales call.
An engineering portal in civil infrastructure is almost always a catalog with a contact form bolted on, and Vodaland USA wanted the opposite. Its buyers should be able to pull a CAD file, run the numbers, and assemble a submittal without ever waiting on a human. Intero Digital delivered a gated portal that lets specifiers self-serve everything the sales team used to gatekeep, so technical deals advance on product fit instead of dying in a document request.
The four audiences do not agree on where a catalog begins. An engineer starts at load class, a contractor starts at the job site, an architect starts at the spec sheet, and a procurement manager starts at the part number. The information architecture opens three parallel doors, by product line, by load class, and by environment, so a visitor enters from whichever direction matches how they already think.
Load class usually hides as a line item inside a PDF, which forces an engineer to open documents just to rule products out. The portal promotes load class from A15 through F900 into a first-class filter, and the same holds for product line across Drain, Terra, Urban, and Clean, and for environments from public roads to food and sanitary. The classification a specifier cares about is the one they navigate by.
Finding an asset is only half the task when the answer spans four dimensions at once. A faceted resource library cuts across product category, material type, load class, and document type in a single query, so an engineer pulls DWG and BIM files for permeable pavers, or installation manuals for grease traps, in one action instead of a support ticket.
A catalog site stops at the file. This build does not. Behind authentication, the portal runs engineering calculators for channel capacity, catchment area, and wastewater flow rate, and it saves every calculation to the user's account, so the math that used to happen in a separate tool now happens in place and stays with the project.
Specification work rarely fits one job or one session. Each account carries project folders, a personal document library, a favorites system, submittal package assembly, and a request path for non-standard specs, so the portal becomes where a job's specs actually live, across every project a user is running at once.
A large share of the market Vodaland serves works in Spanish on site and in English on the spec. The entire portal runs bilingual across both languages, so a contractor and the engineer who specified the job read the same documentation without translation friction.
The interface earns its restraint. When the payload is dense specification data, decoration competes with legibility, and legibility has to win. Typography, spacing, and a comparison table system carry the real load, resolving four product families with overlapping applications and different load ranges into one scannable decision surface, so the finished product reads as a tool and not a brochure.
Results & Impact
The specification workflow itself now lives on the web. A user searches, calculates, saves, assembles, and submits inside one authenticated portal, so a technical deal advances on product fit and price instead of stalling on document retrieval.
- Gated to self-serve: CAD files, load ratings, and submittal packages that once required a sales call are retrievable behind login.
- Calculation in place: channel capacity, catchment area, and wastewater flow rate run in the browser, with history saved to the account.
- Assembly, not requests: users build and submit submittal packages in-session across project folders.
- One build, two languages: the full portal operates in English and Spanish.
