Website rebuild with photo quotes

A wheel repair shop in the US

The shop straightens, repairs and powder coats wheels. Drivers bring in wheels with curb rash or a bend, and a lot of them need the car back quickly because it is the only car in the house. Dealers, body shops and fleets send work too.

The owner told us early on that what he wants most is more wheels, and in particular more retail customers, who pay on the spot. The customers he already had were happy with him, and a lot of them had said so in Google reviews.

The shop joined Iron Rainbow’s coating network as a partner. On one of our first calls he mentioned that his website had not been touched in years and asked whether we did that kind of work. A new site became part of the partnership.

A website that hid its best asset

The old site was built on a heavy theme with a page builder and a stack of plugins. Its reviews page loaded the reviews with a script in the browser after the page had arrived. Visitors saw them eventually. A search engine asking for the page saw almost no text at all, so every customer who wrote “curb rash” or “bent rim” and the make of their car counted for nothing in search.

The homepage banner rotated films every few seconds, with the sound on and no way to pause. Several service pages told the same story in slightly different words. Old promotion cards were still up, so a customer could arrive expecting less than the job would cost. Most of the photos and videos lived on social media links that stop working after a while. On a phone the homepage took a long time to show anything at all, and it jumped around while it loaded.

Taking it apart before building it again

We started by saving every page of the old site and listing everything it ran. Then we went after the media before it disappeared: the shop’s own videos and photos from its social accounts. One clip had already lost its video by the time we reached it. From what we saved, the best clips made the new site.

Before any design work the owner got a document we call the Teardown. It goes through the old site finding by finding and puts a cost on each one. The last pages are our proposal.

He told us on a call how he wanted the homepage ordered: his own headline, then reviews, services, the work and the booking tool. We later moved the quote tool up to sit right under the headline, because that is what the site is for. We kept his words wherever they were good, from the way he describes his process to the safety reasoning behind straightening. The colors come from his logo.

Readable reviews and a price from a photo

The reviews now sit on the page as ordinary text, each with the reviewer’s name and date. A small job fetches the latest ones every week and republishes the site only when something changed. Search engines can read every one of them now, and so can a customer on a slow phone.

We left out the star-rating markup that some sites add about themselves, because Google’s rules say a business should not rate itself on its own site. The page shows the rating the way Google’s own badge does.

The look-alike service pages became one Wheel Repair and Refinishing page, and every old address forwards to its replacement so nothing the shop ranked for is lost. Powder coating and straightening each got a page of their own. Every video sits behind a still frame and plays muted only when tapped. We picked the still frames by hand, because several clips opened on a logo or a black screen.

The biggest change is the quote. On three pages, starting with the home page, a customer can photograph each damaged wheel. The Iron Rainbow tool asks for the close-ups it needs, works out the damage, and gives a price for the repair and the new finish. The site shows no prices anywhere else, so nobody is quoted from an old card again.

One thing we refused to build was a before-and-after slider. Two of the shop’s photos named as the before and after of one job turned out to be two different wheels on two different cars. They are on the site as separate examples until the shop sends a matched pair.

How a customer finds the shop now

Someone nearby with a scraped wheel searches for curb rash repair. The words they typed are on the shop’s reviews page, written by other drivers from the same area. The page opens in a few seconds on a phone and stays still while it loads. Under the headline they can photograph the wheel and get a price, or tap the number and call the shop.

Every fact about the business, from the phone number to the opening hours, lives in one file, so the site never disagrees with itself. The whole site is plain pages with nothing to patch, and the domain stays in the owner’s name.

The new site is running on a private review address with the quote tool in place. Pointing the shop’s domain at it is the owner’s call, and until he makes it, the old site is still the one people see.