For our client project of semester 2 we had to choose a client, I chose to do "WheelEasy" a car dealership located in Barnstable, Devon, which is a small costal town in Devon. Along side me in this project was George Pike (Design) and Luke Legge (CAD).
The client wanted a number of things, most notably being a new and improved website, an app to go with it and a social media presence. Communication with the client was not great and we did not hear a lot from them, after a while we got dropped by them as they wanted to work with someone else, once this happened we decided we would re brand the whole thing including the logo.
My role in this group project was making the website and the branding.
Project Goals
- Create a working website for the client that was an improvement over their previous one.
- To make this website I used WIX, this is due to it being a lot easier to use and the client's existing website was made on WIX. It is also a website that I have experience in using
- Another one of our main goals was to have a simple graphic style and be a "stress free" experience for people to use, this was one of the main issues that we found with the original WheelEasy website and was at the top of our list of things that we had to improve for the company.
The logo(s) and banner(s)
The logo was not liked by the group and others not working on this project, what they had as a logo was just a banner but had all the elements to make a logo, I chose to take the logo apart and see what they have already go to redesign the logo. The group decided that the new logo looked a lot better than the existing one and decided to keep it.
I made a few different variations of the logo but kept the same layout that I originally made, some with different fonts the other variants used elements like circles, lines and colouring on the text.
Colours
The colours that we used were the ones that the client was using, as a group it was one of the things we liked and decided to keep them.
The website
The website was the most time consuming part of this project, when I started making the site the client was still with us and did not have a new website and were still using their old one, so I was going off what they already had, which was a very simple and basic WIX site, so for the new site I also used WIX, I prefered using WIX over potentially coding in HTML and CSS at I know how to use it quite well and already knew what I wanted to do with it.
I first started off with deciding which pages I wanted to make, I ended up using the same ones that they were already using on their old website, being... HOME, ABOUT, STOCK, CONTACT and FAQs. I started to draw up simple UI designs in my sketch book for how I wanted them to look, including things like the colours and what buttons will do ect.
After I had my initial sketches of the website I moved to making them in high definition to give it a better look and to help me decide what I wanted to keep and what not to keep. It also gave me a clear understanding of what colours looked good, general positioning of images and text and how the overall site would look when it came to making it.
Home page
The homepage includes a clean menu with the original sections and a new logo I designed. I added a carousel to showcase cars using images from the client’s site, linking to product pages. Missing car info was filled in with consistent details using ChatGPT. I also added an email signup box for updates and a short "About" section to introduce the company.
About page
The about page was something that the client wanted to keep, it was also mentioned as being important in the brief.
It is a simple page where I took the existing information that was on their old site and added it to the new site.
I did not intent it to be anything special, just to have the text about the client.
During my research I did not see a lot of brand dealers like VW or Porsche have an about section but most of the local and small dealerships did have one so this also encouraged me implement it on here,
Stock page
The stock page was key, as the original lacked details like prices, images, and car info. I used images from the client’s site, and for missing ones, I found matching car images online. Each listing shows the car name and price, and clicking it leads to a product page with full details—something the original site didn’t include. I researched what buyers look for (e.g. price, mileage, age, make) through peer feedback and car websites, then used ChatGPT to write consistent car descriptions. Each listing also has a “Buy” button linking to a billing page mock-up, as I couldn’t fully implement checkout without paid tools.
Contact page
The contact page was something I re designed, using the clients original as a bench mark, WIX has a built in contact page so it was very simple for me to implement it into the new site.
The difference between what I did and what the client originally did was there would just be an email which the user would have to copy into their email, while the one that I used allowed them to stay on the site and send the mail, which works a lot better than what was already in place.
FAQs page
This was a page that the client wanted to keep from their original site, it was a very simple page to make. The same FAQs were taken from their existing site and added to the new one, the font and style was changed for the questions to make them stand out so people know that its a question, the answer was left the same.
There was an issue with the FAQ page as when I went to get the questions and answers the company had changed their site and did not have the questions there so I improvised and asked ChatGTP for some common questions and answers that a small local car dealership would get.
Payment page
The payment page was the last page that I created, to get to this there is a button that the user presses on the stock page, when pressed it brings you to here. This is not an official WIX payment page as that gets a bit complicated, so I re purposed an email news lettering template, I included the most common and important things a payment page needs, being a place to put your banking information and a delivery address.
If I was to do this page differently in the future it would be to have a pick up option or a home delivery option.
