Motor trade & recovery
Websites for recovery and the motor trade.
Recovery pricing is a set of rules — distance, time of day, vehicle, complications. Rules can be published and calculated. Most of the industry still hides them behind a phone call.
What actually makes this hard.
Someone at the side of a road at eleven at night is not browsing. They want a number, a time and a phone that gets answered, in that order, and they are looking at a phone screen with one bar of signal and a flat battery to worry about.
But recovery prices genuinely vary — mileage, peak hours, the type of vehicle, whether it rolls. A single fixed price would be dishonest and “call for a quote” loses the customer to whoever answers first. The workable answer is to encode the actual pricing rules and let the site calculate, which also means every quote comes out consistent whoever is on shift.
Alongside the urgent work sits the planned side — auction delivery, transport, export, scrap collection. That customer is comparing carefully and wants detail, which is a different page and a different pace entirely.
Built for this industry
A real one, live, documented in full.
A North Lanarkshire recovery and vehicle-export business, with a live pricing engine built from its own rules.
What these projects need
The parts that tend to earn their place.
- 01Pricing calculated from stated rules
- Publish the base price, the mileage rate, the peak-time uplift and the add-ons, then calculate from them. Transparency and speed at once, and no one on the team quoting differently.
- 02Emergency contact that never scrolls away
- A call bar pinned to the screen. For urgent recovery, the fastest path to a human is the entire product.
- 03Vehicle detail without the typing
- Cascading make, model, year and engine beats a free-text box that produces “blue van” and a follow-up call.
- 04Planned work kept separate
- Auction delivery, transport and export are considered purchases with different questions. Mixing them into the emergency path serves neither.
- 05Payment prepared, honestly labelled
- Deposits and card payment are straightforward to build in. What matters is that the site never implies a payment route is live before it is.
Not every project needs all of this. Which parts earn their place is what the first conversation is for — and the honest answer is sometimes that a straightforward website is enough. Here’s how to tell.
Before you ask
The questions that usually come next.
Straight answers on time, money and what you end up owning.
See all the questions01How long does it take?
A smaller website is usually about a week, measured from the point everything is ready — your text, photos and any brand assets in hand. Custom systems like booking or quoting tools take up to four weeks. In practice the honest variable is how quickly content comes back; that stretches timelines far more often than the build does.
02How does payment work?
Half up front to start the work, and the remaining half on the day the site goes live. Nothing in between, and no charges you haven't already seen on the quote. Ownership transfers with that final payment.
03Do I own the website?
Yes — outright, on final payment. That covers the design, the code written for your project and your content. Your domain is registered in your name, so you control the address itself and can take it elsewhere whenever you like. The underlying open-source frameworks stay under their own licences, as they do for any website. The only thing kept back is the right to show the work here as a case study.
04Can I update the site myself?
Sites here are hand-built rather than assembled in a page builder, so there is no admin panel by default — changes come through me. Small tweaks are covered by the care plan, and where you'll be updating something regularly, I build a proper interface for exactly that. If managing all your own content day to day matters to you, say so at the start: it's a reasonable thing to want, and it changes how the site should be built.
05What does hosting cost after the first year?
The first year of hosting is included. After that it's £65 a year for hosting on its own, or £180 a year for a care plan — hosting plus small tweaks and ongoing updates as you need them. Your domain renews separately and stays registered in your name. There's no obligation to take either: you own the site and can host it wherever you want.
06Do you outsource the work?
No. Every project is handled directly by George, from the first conversation through to launch. There's no account manager in between and no work passed to a third party.
Not your trade?
Tell us how the work actually comes in.
What happens between an enquiry arriving and a job being priced is usually where the useful work is. Describe that and we’ll come back with a scope and a straight answer on cost.