How We Revved Up West Coast Collector Autos

We recently launched a website for West Coast Collector Autos in Westminster, California, and there’s a bit of magic going on behind the scenes to make this site as helpful to car enthusiasts as it can be.

The site had a limited budget and the business had no logo, so we used a simple theme for this WordPress-based site and put the bulk of the budget toward developing custom features that presented these unique vehicles in the best possible light.

The home page (shown in the featured image above) highlights a slideshow of the featured vehicles—a typical treatment on modern sites—but our slideshow has some custom features built in: Each slide displays two buttons; clicking one of those buttons takes you to the detail for the featured vehicle, and clicking the other takes you to the listing of all the vehicles. It’s simple in concept and in use, but a bit more complex in the coding.

>Once you’re on the vehicle detail page (inset image), another slideshow displays all of the views of the vehicle, with a large revolving featured image and other images displayed beneath in a carousel of thumbnail views. Again, the goal of this custom-coded slideshow was to present the information about the vehicle in a simple and intuitive fashion to the site visitor.

Our goal is always to make a site as easy to use for the site owner as it is for the site visitor, and West Coast Collector Autos is no exception. We created a custom post type for vehicles, with custom fields for the vehicle make, model, year, mileage, VIN, vehicle highlights, and vehicle detail text, as well as a checkbox which displays the vehicle on the home page slideshow or not. Adding a vehicle is just a simple, repeatable matter of filling in the blanks and uploading photos, and our system automatically creates an attractive detail page with slideshow, adds the vehicle to the home page slideshow (or not), adds the vehicle to the full vehicles listing page, and creates all the custom buttons that link everything together.

One more custom feature on the vehicle detail page is the “Contact Us About This Vehicle” button, which, when clicked, takes you to the contact page form with the vehicle info already filled in. It’s just one more simple and intuitive feature that makes interacting with the site easier for the site visitor.

It takes some work to make things easy, but the benefits for both the site owner and all the site visitors are obvious. Give us a call if we can help make your website work harder for your business and your customers.

You can take the site for a spin yourself at West Coast Collector Autos.