Case study · St. Louis, Missouri
An established St. Louis repair shop that had moved premises, and a web presence that had not moved with it. The job turned out to be much less about the website than about everything around it.
What was there
One page, and every link in the navigation went nowhere — parts, cars, about, contact, warranty, shipping, privacy, terms. It also listed specific vehicles, prices and inventory counts that did not correspond to anything real, which is worse than having no site at all.
The new address was right in one place and wrong in most others. Name, address and phone disagreeing across services is one of the strongest suppressors of local ranking there is, and it is invisible from the inside — the owner sees the one listing he checks.
The listing carried the previous address, and its website field pointed at a review directory rather than at the business. Apple Maps was handing the shop’s own traffic to somebody else.
A free consumer address on every quote and invoice. The cheapest credibility problem there is to fix, and one of the most visible.
What was built
Plain files, no plugins, no database behind the pages, deployed to a global network. Its own automated checks have to pass before it can publish.
A vector mark delivered with every favicon and app-icon size, a maskable icon set, and a social card. The written brand note records the size below which the mark stops being legible, because every mark has one and the owner should be told which.
Vehicle fitment search, catalogue, product pages, cart, checkout and an admin area. Backed by 115 automated tests, plus a deploy script that smoke-tests the live site afterwards — because a deploy reporting success is not evidence the site works.
Product data, photography and fitment coming from the manufacturers’ own licensed feed, with images re-hosted rather than hotlinked because the licence requires it. It serves the licensed feed when it has one and the built-in catalogue when it does not, so switching over is a data event rather than a rebuild.
Proper mailboxes with the authentication records — SPF, DKIM and a strict DMARC policy — that keep a small business’s mail out of spam folders and stop anyone else sending as them.
Google Business Profile fixed, the Apple Business claim run, and corrections pushed to the data aggregators that feed the map apps — which is also where AI assistants now get their answers about local businesses.
A short one to read on a phone and a full one for the desk, both written around what was being taken off his plate rather than what was being asked of him.
What was refused
Anyone can tell you what they built. What you cannot easily check before hiring someone is what they declined to do when doing it would have been easier, faster, or made the result look better.
The old site’s vehicles, prices, inventory counts, founding year and warranty terms were not carried across. If a figure could not be traced to something real, it did not ship.
Part numbers, prices and fitment are facts and are not copyrightable. Product photographs and written descriptions are, and no amount of rewriting changes that. The catalogue images come from a licensed manufacturer feed instead.
Review markup without collected reviews is exactly what search engines’ review-snippet guidelines exist to stop. The build fails if it appears.
The catalogue pipeline refuses rather than invents: no advertisable price and the part is skipped and counted; no supplier cost and it shows zero margin rather than an estimate; no category match and it is refused rather than filed somewhere approximate. Nothing is ever deleted, only marked inactive.
Every one of these was a real decision on a real day, and each one cost something — a smaller catalogue, a plainer page, a longer wait. They are on this page because the same judgement is what you would be buying.
Most do. The listings one in particular is almost universal and almost invisible from the inside.