Garage Website Design — Longcross Garage Case Study

A Bristol Saab and Vauxhall specialist, a client since 2008 — through a full rebrand, with the website, hosting, email and SEO all handled here throughout.

Eighteen years, one supplier, one uninterrupted website

Longcross Garage are Saab and Vauxhall specialists in Bristol, offering used car sales, servicing and MOTs. They have been a client since 2008 — before Mediatopia existed, carried across when it was founded, and still a client today.

In that time their website has been online continuously. Not rebuilt from scratch by a new agency every few years, not left to rot and replaced in a panic, not moved between hosts and broken in the process. Eighteen years of the same site being maintained, rebuilt and kept current by the same person.

The client has never had to think about any of it. Website, hosting, email, search optimisation and content have all been handled here throughout. They run a garage; they have never had to run a website.

Carrying a business through a rebrand

When we started, the business was Economy Saab. It later became Longcross Garage — a new name, a new identity, and the same customers.

A rebrand is one of the easiest ways to lose everything a website has built up. Change the domain and the name without handling it properly and you lose the rankings, the inbound links, the search history and often the email as well. Businesses do it every year and wonder why the phone stops ringing.

Handled correctly it is invisible. The old addresses redirect to the right places, the search presence transfers rather than restarting, the email keeps working through the changeover, and the customers who knew the old name still find the new one. That is what happened here, and it is the sort of work nobody notices when it goes right.

What a garage website actually needs

Most people looking for a garage are in one of two situations. Something has gone wrong and they need it fixed, or the MOT is due and they want a price and a date. Neither of them is browsing.

That means the site has to answer the practical questions immediately: what you do, where you are, when you are open and how to book. Everything else is secondary. We build mobile-first because those people are almost always on a phone, often in a hurry, sometimes at the roadside.

For a garage selling used cars there is a second job — the stock needs to be current and findable, because a forecourt listing that is three months out of date costs you the enquiry and the trust at the same time.

If you run a garage, MOT centre or motor trade business in Bristol and the website is not bringing work, that is exactly the job. The Bristol Hydralifts case study and the Aztec Paving case study are comparable long-term projects.

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.