The guide

What a website is actually for.

Most shop websites are a brochure that happens to be online. A working one does a job: it gives a price, it takes a booking, and it answers somebody at eleven at night when you are asleep. Here is how to tell which one you have.

Do this first — it takes thirty seconds

Pick up your phone. Not your computer — your phone. Search your own shop, tap through to your website, and start a stopwatch.

How long until you can see a price? Not a form to ask for one. An actual number.

If the answer is “you can’t,” that is the whole article and you can stop reading. The rest of this is why it matters more than anything else on the page.

A brochure answers “who are you.” A working site answers “can you do my car, when, and for how much.”

Those are different questions and almost every shop site answers the first one. Homepage, About, Services, Contact, a gallery, a form. It is tidy, it looks professional, and it is built around what a business wants to say rather than what a customer arrived to find out.

The customer is not browsing. He is standing in a car park with a chipped windshield, or sitting in his truck after somebody quoted him $900 for a timing belt, and he has three tabs open. He has one question and about forty seconds of patience. The shop that answers it gets the call.

The five things a site has to do in this trade

  1. Say what it costs, or say honestly why it can’t. A number beats a range, a range beats “call for pricing,” and “call for pricing” loses to the shop down the road that published one. If your work genuinely varies — a wrap, hail damage — then say what it depends on and give a floor. The whole argument is here.
  2. Let him start it without talking to you. A booking, a deposit, a “send me a photo of the panel” — something he can do at 11pm on his sofa. The moment your only route is a phone call, you have limited your business to your opening hours.
  3. Show your actual work, not stock cars. He is buying an appearance. He wants to see what your hands produce, on cars like his, in your bay. Most shops shoot this badly and it costs them.
  4. Answer the two or three things everyone asks. How long does it take. Is it legal. Will it bubble. Do I leave the car. You already answer these fifteen times a week on the phone — every one of those calls is a page you have not written.
  5. Load fast on a phone with two bars. Your customer is not on your wifi. He is in a car park at the edge of town.

What a website will not do for you

It will not make the phone ring on its own. A site is where people land, not how they find you — those are two separate jobs and the second one is a different piece of work entirely. I have watched shops spend real money on a beautiful site and then wonder why nothing changed, and the reason is always the same: nobody was ever going to see it.

It also will not fix a shop that answers the phone badly, or one that never follows up on the quote it sent on Tuesday. A website makes you easy to buy from. It cannot make you easy to deal with.

If you fix one thing

Put a price on it. Not a form, not a promise to get back to them — a number, on a page, where a man in a car park can find it in thirty seconds. It is the cheapest change on this list and in my experience it is the one that moves the phone.

Next

The three places people look A site nobody sees is a brochure in a drawer. This is how being found actually works — and why it is three jobs, not one.

Written for independent auto repair and auto glass shops. If you read this and fix it yourself, that is a good outcome and I would rather that than sell you something you do not need.

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