HLTEC: Four-language platform for urban LED lighting
Client: HLTEC Services: Web design and development, Four-language content architecture, Visual system Duration: 10 weeks (the four-language pass added 2 weeks to the standard 8-week web build) 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.
Where it shipped
The platform is live in four languages and serves as HLTEC's primary export-facing surface. Municipal procurement leads, urban-design consultancies, and Taiwan and Japan distributors all land on the same site, each in their own language, against the same urban-infrastructure framing.
HLTEC's sales team uses the product detail pages in pre-quote conversations. The IP rating, wattage, lumen output, and certification notes sit on the page, so the back-and-forth that used to happen over email about basic specs now starts one step deeper. The Traditional Chinese pages are what HLTEC sends Taiwan distributors first, before any call.
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. The marketing lead already worked in WordPress and needed to keep editing across four languages without us in the loop.
- Elementor. Page-level layout edits in four languages without a developer. The team can swap a hero image or rewrite a service card in any locale on their own.
- WPML for EN/KO/zh-TW/JA delivery. The only WordPress translation plugin that handles four parallel locales with separate URL structures and per-language SEO. Critically, it treats Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese as distinct locales, which the Taiwan export path required.
- Custom product carousel module. Off-the-shelf carousels did not handle SKU-level localization (spec labels in four languages, certification notes per market) without breaking layout.
- Service-card section with localized copy per language. Built as a reusable block so the four service categories stay in sync across locales when copy gets revised.
- Inline contact form routed to HLTEC's sales inbox. Short form at the top of funnel, single inbox for all four languages, no plugin lock-in on the routing.
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 info@cclemang.com.
