Midwest Engineered Systems

Overview of my accomplishments at MWES

This is a breakdown of my accomplishments during my time with MWES. These accomplishments include migrating and redesigning the company’s site, creating illustrations, photo and video editing, programming an ROI calculator from scratch, writing several blog posts, and creating general content for the site.

Additionally, much of my work here overlapped with my work at ADDere Additive Manufacturing.

The Company Website

Link: www.mwes.com

My history with MWES goes back to 2006 when I redesigned their website as a contractor. It was a pretty standard site for the time and utilized PHP and CSS. It was a nice site for the time and existed there for a few years and changed hands many times after that.

Fast forward to 2020, when I was hired as a Marketing Assistant, the site at that time was hosted on Wix and was an inadequate service for the demands that this site required. It was shortly thereafter, the site was ported over pixel-by-pixel to a WordPress/Divi environment, which fixed the problems Wix created but the site still needed a facelift. It was thereafter that we began rebuilding the site from scratch with a fresh WordPress install.

The first order of business was transferring over the content of over 300 pages and blog posts, minus any embellishments that appeared on the old site. The next task was completely rebuilding WordPress’s media library with more web-friendly versions of all the graphics and photos. After that, I set out to build the templates that were used for the different kinds of pages, such as the industry pages, project pages, landing pages, and a few others, where a great deal of time and effort went into the attention to detail. This allowed the site to finally have a cohesive uniform look that was missing from the previous version. As for plugins we used Elementor as the page builder, Yoast to handle all the SEO, schema microdata and a few others to help with the site migration.

The ROI Calculator

Link: www.mwes.com/roi-calculator

I wrote the ROI Calculator entirely from scratch in about half a day in vanilla JavaScript with the help of the Google Graphs API. To make this I reverse-engineered another ROI calculator that had a more primitive data handling mechanism where the calculations were handled on the server side through a user-initiated page POST. My work on REMLAB was of great use in my understanding of DOM handling and analyzing the data of the original calculator to achieve the same results but in a more user-friendly way.

Graphics, Illustrations & Photography

I designed several new illustrations using Adobe Illustrator for use on the site as well as redesigned several older illustrations to match the color scheme and style. Some of these illustrations were improved to replace static images of unknown origin, with the intent to display them on the site as raw SVG images instead of raster images.

Additionally, I created several unique WiseStamp email signature banners for the over 100 company email users. These banners were seen throughout the firm.

Lastly, I did extensive work editing photos. The majority of MWES’ photos were professionally taken and did not require any substantial editing. However, they have a lot of photos that go back 20+ years that were taken with a personal phone or a point-and-shoot camera, and those required me to do a good amount of editing and background removal in Photoshop.

Pages & Blog Posts That I Wrote

MWES.com contains over 260 pages and over 70 blog posts, and I wrote dozens of those pages and blog posts. Additionally, I had my hand in editing and augmenting virtually all the other pages on the site. The Recent Projects section of the site was written with the help of the original project quote document and other sales material. I would take that document and rewrite its key content to read more naturally. As for writing the blog posts, my research would include seeking out relevant topics by visiting our competitors’ blogs, utilizing ChatGPT and following the website’s 404 logs. Most of the blog posts dated September 2021 onward were written by me.

Social Media & Additional Web Presence

I cleaned up the company’s YouTube Channel to fill in some of the gaps that existed and to make everything more consistent in regards to the content between the channel’s videos. Additionally, I freshened up the company’s membership profile page on the A3 Automate.org site as well. Much of MWES’ content on that site was 10 years out of date. Keeping a web presence on sites like this current can help with SEO and driving traffic to the business.

Solidworks and 3D Renderings

I created several 3D renderings with Solidworks Visualize. These were taken from the original CAD files of complete automation systems created by the engineers and with Visualize I was able to dress up the systems to make them look more realistic. I also recreated several robotic systems from scratch in Blender to use as interactive AR models for the website.