A mobile detailing business that lives on its phone

The job a detailing website has to do

Detailing is a visual trade with a variable price. Two cars in the same condition can be a hundred pounds apart depending on the paint, and customers know that, so they are not looking for a fixed price. They are looking for proof that you know what you are doing, and then for an easy way to ask.

That shapes everything. The gallery has to load instantly on mobile data or nobody scrolls it. The prices have to be honest about what changes them. And the way to get in touch has to be in front of you on every single screen, because people decide in about fifteen seconds and then act.

What we built

A page for each service, not one long list. Valeting, paint correction and ceramic coating are three different purchases at three different price points. Each gets its own page, which also means a search like “ceramic coating Wolverhampton” has somewhere specific to land rather than dumping people on a general services page.

A before and after gallery that actually loads. Detailing photos are the whole pitch, and the default way of publishing them, straight off a phone at four megabytes each, makes a page that never finishes loading on 4G. Every image is compressed properly and sized for the screen asking for it.

Areas covered, spelled out. Mobile means the van goes to the customer, so the towns it covers had to be obvious. That answers the first question anyone has, and it is also what makes the business findable in the places it actually serves.

Pricing that explains itself. Rather than one number, the site sets out what is in each package and what moves the figure. It means the quote requests that come in are from people who already understand roughly what they are buying.

Contact everywhere, on every page. Tap to call in the header, a quote form that asks about the vehicle up front, and a booking route. Nothing is more than one tap away at any point.

Square set up, with the admin around it automated. Bookings and payments run through Square. The repetitive work that normally sits around a booking system, and that a one van business ends up doing by hand in the evening, runs on its own instead.

DS Central, an application built for the business. The website is the front of the business. DS Central is the application built to run it behind the scenes, so the day to day is not spread across a phone, an inbox and a notebook.

That last pair is the part most detailing sites do not have, and it is the reason this one is here rather than a prettier example. A website that brings the work in is only half of it. What happens after someone books is where a small business actually wins or loses the evening.

What it taught us

This is where the approach in the rest of our work came from. Build it as static files so it loads fast on a bad signal. Write for the question the customer is actually asking. Put the way to get in touch in front of people constantly rather than politely once at the bottom.

It is also why we are straight about search. The site is set up properly, and the reviews the business has earned do more for it in local search than any amount of clever technical work. That is just true, and we would rather say so than sell you something else.

Want yours to work like this?

We will design a real mockup of your site before you spend anything, so you can see what it would look like for your business rather than taking our word for it.