MTE: Evolving a website from recruitment tool to lead generation engine

Project background

MTE is a multi-disciplinary engineering and consulting firm with over 40 years of experience and offices across Ontario, including Kitchener-Waterloo, the GTA, and London. Over time, the organization has grown significantly in both scale and capability, delivering projects across a wide range of markets including infrastructure, land development, and municipal services.

While MTE had a strong reputation built on long-standing client relationships, their website had not evolved alongside the business. It no longer reflected the full scope of their expertise or their regional presence and was primarily positioned as a recruitment tool rather than a platform to support marketing, client engagement, or business development. To address this, MTE partnered with Stryve to redesign their website as part of a broader effort to better align their digital presence with who they are today and where they are going next.

The mission

MTE’s website no longer reflected their capabilities or the direction of the business. The mission was to:

• Reposition their business by shifting how MTE communicated their expertise
• Showcase their full range of services and markets they service
• Better support lead generation
• Improve content discoverability
• Create a user-friendly experience for their team

Prior to the website project, Stryve had also partnered with MTE on developing their messaging strategy. This work defined how MTE should communicate their value, capabilities, and positioning across markets and audiences.

A key part of this engagement was translating that strategy into a real-world application. The website became one of the largest and most important expressions of that messaging system, with the goal of turning strategic positioning into a tangible, user-facing experience.

Strategy and site architecture

MTE’s existing site had grown over time into a complex mix of pages, services, markets, and supporting content, which made it difficult for users to navigate and even harder for the internal team to manage. We kicked off the project with intensive discovery to understand in what ways the website was no longer serving their business and where it fell short. This clarified their business goals, target markets, website user journeys, key functionalities, and ultimately, the requirements for the new site.

We reworked the sitemap and introduced a more intentional structure built around key business areas, including services, markets, and project work. A major focus was making the site work as a true content system rather than a static collection of pages. We ensured that services, markets, case studies, and team content could be connected and filtered in meaningful ways, improving how users discovered relevant information and how MTE could continue to grow the site internally.

Wireframing

The goal of wireframing was to define how content could be experienced across the site through a flexible, modular system.

MTE has a large portfolio of work and services, so the challenge was not reducing content, but structuring it in a way that felt approachable and easy to scan. We prioritized clarity, consistent layout patterns, and strong content hierarchy to support both quick browsing and deeper exploration.

Where possible, we designed a set of reusable page templates that could scale across services, markets, and project content. The wireframes also ensured the system could support MTE’s long-term growth. By building flexibility into the structure from the start, we created a foundation that would allow new services, markets, and project content to be added quickly and consistently.

Copywriting

Prior to the website project, Stryve developed a messaging strategy that clarified how MTE should communicate their value, capabilities, and positioning across audiences. A key part of the website project was demonstrating how the messaging strategy could come to life by applying it to new website content.

We focused on making the language clear, direct, and user-focused. Instead of leading with internal descriptions of the business, the copy emphasized client outcomes, expertise, and the real-world value MTE brings to projects. This helped shift the tone of the site from organization-first to client-first.

While blogs, news, and case studies were not rewritten, the core site content was restructured and rewritten to align with the new messaging direction, ensuring the website functioned as a practical application of the strategy rather than a separate layer on top of it.

Design

The design direction focused on creating a clean, airy experience that let MTE’s work and photography take center stage. The goal was to move away from a heavy, block-based interface and instead create something that felt modern, approachable, and confident, while still reflecting the scale and credibility of a 40-year-established engineering firm.

We leaned into large imagery and video to showcase projects and bring more visual storytelling into the experience. The design system used subtle brand elements, including rounded image corners and refined typography choices, to create consistency without feeling overly corporate or rigid. MTE also had strong existing photography and drone assets, so the design was intentionally built to highlight that content rather than compete with it.

We also created flexible, drag-and-drop modules for large content-heavy sections, ensuring consistency across pages with varying levels of complexity.

Development, launch, and training

We built the website as a custom WordPress theme using the Block Editor to give MTE a content management experience that’s flexible enough to scale with the business and simple enough for their internal marketing team to run without relying on development resources for day-to-day changes.

To support this, we created a library of reusable blocks and patterns spanning services, markets, and project content, so MTE could build new pages consistently while maintaining design integrity and structure across the site.

Following launch, we provided training and documentation covering the block system, content updates, and consistency guidelines, so MTE’s team could manage and grow the site confidently.

The impact

The new MTE website better reflects who they are today as a large, multi-disciplinary engineering and consulting firm with a strong presence across Ontario. It shifts the focus of the site from recruitment-first to one built to support marketing, business development, and lead generation.

“Before, we never had leads coming through forms, and we’ve had 14 leads since launch that turned into proposals. That’s been the biggest thing and it’s cool that it’s resonating with people to take action before we even pushed [the new site] out to the public.”
– Amy Furtado, Director, Marketing

By improving structure, messaging, and content discovery, the site now makes it easier for prospective clients to understand MTE’s full range of services, markets, and capabilities. This has strengthened how the organization is positioned online and improved how users engage with their expertise and project work. Behind the scenes, the new WordPress block-based system gives the MTE team a flexible and user-friendly back-end experience.

The website is now a true reflection of the business today and is better positioned as a lead generation tool that supports MTE’s next phase of growth.