HLTEC: Four-language platform for urban LED lighting
Client: HLTEC Year: 2024 Services: Web Design & Development, Four-language Content Architecture, Visual System Duration: Roughly 8-10 weeks Tech: WordPress, Elementor, WPML
The problem
HLTEC makes LED lighting for urban infrastructure: street fixtures, architectural, downlights for smart-city applications. The buyer spans municipal procurement teams, urban design consultancies, and international distributors targeting European and Asian markets.
The old site was a one-language product list with decent photography and no coherent story. HLTEC wanted to move up the shelf: compete with European lighting brands on the same municipal tenders, land export distribution in Taiwan and Japan, and generally look like a company that ships urban-infrastructure-grade product, not a parts-bin lighting supplier.
The two hard parts of the brief. First, four-language delivery: English, Korean, Traditional Chinese (Taiwan market specifically), and Japanese. Second, hero visuals that carry the urban-infrastructure ambition. Anything that looked like a product-shoot-on-white background would signal the wrong market tier.
What we built
A four-language platform framed around urban illumination with deliberate visual ambition.
- Champs-Élysées-style night-street hero imagery setting the urban-infrastructure frame before a single product appears
- Four-language delivery: English (default), Korean, Traditional Chinese, Japanese
- Product carousel on the homepage with the downlight range (HTDR-5WH, HTDR-8WH, HTDR-10WUS, HTDR-15WUS)
- Four service-card categories: Customized Manufacturing, Lighting Design Consultation, Installation and Maintenance, Energy Audits and Efficiency Upgrades
- Inline contact form with Name / Email / Message fields on the homepage (a short form at the top of the funnel beats a long form deeper in the site)
- Smart-city and urban-infrastructure framing in the copy, positioned against "efficient street lighting" rather than "LED bulbs"
- Product detail pages with the specs municipal procurement needs (IP rating, wattage, lumen output, certification notes)
How we built it
Weeks 1-2. Visual direction. We looked at the urban-lighting brands HLTEC actually competes with on European tenders and benchmarked against them, not against other Korean LED sites. That reset the design ambition before we wrote a line of code.
Weeks 3-4. Hero imagery and brand system. Urban-at-night photography, clean type system, restrained color (lighting is the color; the UI stays out of the way).
Weeks 5-6. Elementor build, service-card section, product carousel, inline contact form. Korean and English rolled out first.
Weeks 7-8. Traditional Chinese and Japanese localization via WPML. We picked Traditional Chinese rather than Simplified because HLTEC's immediate export path is Taiwan, not mainland China, and that distinction matters to Taiwanese procurement teams.
Weeks 9-10. Service pages, QA, launch.
What it changed
HLTEC now reads as an urban-infrastructure brand rather than an LED component supplier. That shift is the one that unlocks the European-tender conversation. Whether it closes a specific tender depends on things well outside the site. But the site no longer loses the meeting in the first ten seconds, which the old one did.
What we learned
Regional Chinese matters. Traditional and Simplified Chinese are not interchangeable. A Taiwan distributor reading a Simplified Chinese page notices immediately and reads the site as one that does not understand their market. For HLTEC's export strategy, Traditional Chinese was the correct choice. That decision came from the client's regional-sales lead, not from us.
Hero imagery is the brand tier signal. In a product category where 90% of competitor sites open with product-on-white shots, a real-world urban scene does most of the positioning work. We over-invested in the hero photography relative to the rest of the project and it was the best line-item decision we made.
Short inline forms beat long contact pages. The Name / Email / Message form at the bottom of the homepage outperformed the full contact page in our post-launch analytics. Municipal procurement leads do not fill out long forms on vendor sites. They send a three-line message and wait for a reply.
Stack
- WordPress
- Elementor
- WPML for EN/KO/zh-TW/JA delivery
- Custom product carousel module
- Service-card section with localized copy per language
- Inline contact form routed to HLTEC's sales inbox
Want something similar?
Urban-infrastructure, lighting, architectural-products brands that need to compete on a higher visual tier in export markets. Especially if you need Traditional Chinese or Japanese in the language mix. See web design and development or email hello@cclemang.com.
