A website in the owner's words

A hangar that does the whole airplane

The shop is a hangar at a small airport in the US. Airplanes get stripped and painted there in a booth big enough for a whole single or light twin. Interiors are sewn in-house, from seats to headliners. Instrument panels are drawn, cut and engraved for avionics upgrades. The shop also does annuals and inspections, and the mechanics are pilots themselves.

Car people found the shop on their own. Its social media had classic car seats on the sewing table and hot rods in the paint booth.

The owner knows the trade in detail. Colored aviation paint costs several times what white does, and a small airplane takes as much paint as several cars. That is why most airplanes on the ramp are white. Every avionics upgrade to a modern screen needs a new panel, and he has drawn a great many of them.

A template that said maintenance and little else

His website was a website-builder template. It described the business as an aircraft maintenance shop and showed none of the paint or panel work. There was one contact form and no published email address, and the builder’s placeholder account was still in it. The photos of his work lived on social media.

Google was worse. There was no listing under the shop’s name at all. The only listing at his address and phone number was under another name, with no reviews, no website and opening hours that did not match his own.

One phone call, then a site the next day

The owner first spoke to us about Iron Rainbow’s coating network, because his instrument panels get powder coated. The website came up because the one he had did not show any of that work.

We saved every page of the old site and pulled his photos and a video off social media before the links expired. Twenty-one of those photos are on the new site, and every image there is his own work. The words came from his posts and the recorded call, tidied up. The first version went up for review the day after that first call, and a page for cars followed a day later.

The colors come from the sign on his hangar. There is no logo file, so the name is set in type until he sends the sign artwork.

The drafts that read wrong

The first Cars page read like AI. We rewrote it around things only someone in that hangar would know: the jobs on the sewing table, the cars in the booth, and the paperwork that stays with an aircraft part for decades.

An hour later he said the rewrite read rude. In fixing the first problem we had made every sentence short and every point a comparison with somebody else, which sounded like a shop that thought it was better than its customers. We rewrote it again as the owner walking a visitor round his hangar, pleased to be asked. The lessons from that afternoon became the writing rules we use on every partner site since.

A few more things were decided along the way. We claimed no certifications, because none were published and he has not yet told us which to show. We used no stock aviation photos. And the hero waits for a short landscape clip of the booth or the ramp that we asked him to film on his phone, since a generated video would show a hangar that is not his.

How pilots and car owners find the shop

On the new site, a pilot looking for paint work lands on a home page that says one hangar does the whole airplane, followed by the five services in order: paint, upholstery and interiors, avionics and panels, maintenance and inspections, and cars. Each service has its own page in the owner’s words. The paint page explains what color costs. The avionics page explains why a new screen means a new panel. Car owners nearby searching for seat or upholstery work find a page written for them.

The site opens in a few seconds on a phone and does not jump around while it loads, where the old template dragged in a pile of builder scripts first. The call button sits in the header on every page, and fly-in visitors get directions to the hangar from the taxiway.

On the avionics page and two others there is room for an Iron Rainbow finish preview, where a customer will turn a part in 3D and try powder coat and paint finishes before anything is sprayed.

We also wrote the plan for his Google listing: one listing only, the main category taken from the service he calls his best, and the same facts on the profile as on the site, with reviews asked of his own customers and never written for them. It waits on him confirming the existing listing is his.

The new site is on a private review address. His domain still shows the old template until he updates the domain settings and confirms a few remaining facts.