Case Study
Garage Website Design — Longcross Garage Case Study
A Bristol Saab and Vauxhall specialist, a client since 2008, rebuilt in October 2026 as a forecourt you can use: the cars drawn from their own stock list, a number plate on the page that values your car, a loan calculator on the real formula, and what an MOT looks at, drawn.
Eighteen years as a client, and a new website in 2026
Longcross Garage are Saab and Vauxhall specialists on Long Cross Road in Shirehampton, Bristol: used car sales, servicing, MOT testing and bodywork, with over thirty cars in stock and some classics from the 1960s among them. They have been a client since 2008, when they traded as Economy Saab, and their website has been online with us continuously since — through the rebrand, the hosting, the email and the search work, all handled here.
By 2026 that site had become two. The main address was a single page with its terms and privacy policy printed at the foot of it, and three cars from 2023. The cars for sale lived on a second site at another address, with a loan calculator and an about page of its own. A customer looking for a car found one site; a customer looking for an MOT found the other.
The new website folds both into one: eight pages on the main address, every car on it, and every old address from both sites redirected to the right page on the new one, so a link in a listing or a search result still lands.
The cars come from the stock list, not from the page
A garage website is only as good as its stock list is current. On the old sites the cars were typed into the page, which is why three from 2023 were still there in 2026. On the new site every car ticket — on the home page, the cars for sale page, the location page and beside the loan calculator — is drawn from the garage’s own Shop screen in their dashboard. Add a car there with its photographs, its year, fuel, gearbox and price, and it is on the forecourt. Sell it, set it to draft, and it is gone.
Each ticket folds its own page inside it: tap About this car and the description and three more photographs open on the forecourt, so a car never has to leave the page it was found on.
On the cars for sale page the stock finder reads the tickets the website drew: make chips with live counts, a budget band, newest, price and mileage sorts, a search box and a running count of what is showing. Fifty cars would be as usable as five, and a new one filters the moment it is on the page.
What is my car worth, in one number plate
The button in their old header said What is my car worth and opened a form. The new site puts a number plate on the page itself: type the registration, press Value my car, and a drawer slides out from the side with the valuation request already set and the plate carried in.
A second drawer, Find your next car, opens from the hero and from the cars section. It takes the make and the budget off their own stock and writes them into the enquiry, so the message that reaches Steve says what the customer is after rather than “please call me”. The two drawers share one stacked tab on the right-hand edge and close each other, and both post straight into the garage’s own enquiry inbox and the CRM in their dashboard.
Underneath, their eighty years of technical expertise and thirty-plus cars count up on a lilac rail — their own figures, from their own about page, not ours.
What does your car need, and what an MOT looks at
Tick what you are seeing — the MOT is due, a warning light, a service, a noise, rust — and the workshop answers in the words of its own three service boxes, with the photograph that goes with them. It is built with CSS radios, so it works before any script runs and with scripts blocked.
Their own MOT sentence names seven things the test looks at. Each is a numbered point on a side-view car drawn on the page: pick one and that part of the car lights up. Beside it, a countdown: enter the date on your certificate and the page says how long is left, in the right words when it is inside the month and when it is overdue.
Sixteen of their own forecourt photographs — cars on their gravel in front of their own sign, recovered from the slideshow on their 2015 website — make a wall that drifts with the scroll, one row each way. Nothing runs on its own, and nothing is stock: twenty photographs on the page, sixteen theirs.
A loan calculator on the real formula
Their old cars-for-sale site had a loan calculator, so the new one has it too, rebuilt on the real amortised formula: the price, the deposit, the term as chips and the rate in, the monthly payment, the total and the interest out, with a bar showing principal against interest.
Every car ticket carries a Monthly figure link that opens the calculator with that car’s price and name already in it. The calculator is the customer’s own arithmetic on the garage’s own stock; no finance offer is implied and no rate is published that the garage has not.
Live in a day, in the garage's own dashboard
The site went live on longcrossgarage.co.uk on 13 October 2026, with the real logo off their stock site in the header, the footer and the browser tab, their terms and privacy policy word for word, and a corner dock on every page with a chat that answers from the site’s own pages and a photo quote: send a picture of the car and the enquiry goes with it.
Every page was checked before launch at four widths, for contrast, for keyboard use, on an iPhone and through the phone menu, and every instrument was driven on the published page: the plate, the drawers, the symptom picker, the MOT drawing, the finder and the calculator.
It is a managed service: Steve adds and retires cars on the Shop screen, and the pages are ours. If you run a garage, a dealership or a workshop, that is exactly the work. The Volt Bristol case study and the AFB Motorcycles case study are the comparable workshop projects.
What We Built
Project development work carried out
A Forecourt Drawn From Stock
Every car ticket on every page is drawn from the garage’s own Shop screen, each folding its own page with more photographs, and a stock finder with make chips, a budget band, sorts and a live count.
Value My Car, Find Your Next Car
A number plate on the page that hands the registration to a valuation drawer, and a second drawer that fills the enquiry with the make and budget off their own stock.
The MOT, Drawn
Tick what the car is doing and the workshop answers in its own words; seven points on a drawn car for what the test looks at; a countdown from the certificate date.
A Loan Calculator On The Real Formula
Their own calculator rebuilt: term as chips, principal against interest as a bar, and a Monthly figure link on every ticket that carries that car’s price in.
Common Questions
Garage Website Design FAQs
Need a website for your garage?
Tell me what you need and I will give you a fixed price. You deal with the person who builds it — not an account manager, not an offshore team.