The honest version
Two weeks, and about four hours of your time in total, spread across three conversations and one photography session. The stages below are what actually happens. The part that slips is never the build; it is waiting for photographs and for a decision on the chip repair price.
Stage 1: the first conversation
Forty minutes on the phone. We are trying to find out how your business really works, not what you want the site to look like.
What we ask: how much of your work is mobile and how much is in the shop. How much is insurance and how much is retail. Whether you do ADAS recalibration in-house, through a partner, or not at all. Which towns you actually cover and where you draw the line. What a chip repair costs. What job management tool you run, if any.
What you get: a page list and a straight answer on whether you need anything beyond the standard build.
Stage 2: the quote form and the prices
The most important half-hour of the project.
We fix the six fields of the quote form and where the submissions land. We agree the chip repair price that goes on the home page, which is often the first time it has been written down. And we agree the policy sentence: what happens if the photograph turns out to be wrong, and that looking costs nothing.
Shops sometimes want to leave the price off. We push back once, explain that a stated price lifts conversion on the jobs that cannot be priced, and then do whatever you decide.
Stage 3: the insurance and ADAS answers
Twenty minutes, and you do the talking.
We need your insurer list, whether you bill direct, and what you need from a claiming customer. We need your position on recalibration in one sentence, and whether it is included in your quotes.
We write both pages from that conversation and send them for approval. What comes back is usually a correction to the insurer list and nothing else.
Stage 4: photography
Half a day, and it changes the site more than the design does.
The shot list: the van in a real setting, the workshop with a car in the bay, a fitter working, a close-up of a chip repair in progress, a target board set up for a calibration if you do them, and one honest photograph of each fitter. No stock images of a smiling stranger holding a suction cup.
If a photographer is not in budget, we will give you a phone shot list and coach you through it. Real and slightly rough beats polished and generic.
Stage 5: the design direction
One round, one page. We show you the home page and the quote page as a design, not a full site, because that is where all the decisions live.
You get one round of substantive change here and one at review. That constraint is deliberate; it is why the timeline holds.
Stage 6: build
Five to seven working days, and you hear from us twice.
We build the home page, the mobile page, the workshop page, the replacement and repair pages, the insurance page, the ADAS page, the area pages, about and contact. The quote form is built with browser-side image resizing and wired into Jobber, ServiceM8, Housecall Pro or Autoflow, with a text notification to you on every submission.
Stage 7: wiring and testing
The part nobody sees and everybody depends on.
We submit real jobs through the form from an old Android, a current iPhone, and inside the Facebook in-app browser, on throttled mobile data, with ten-megabyte photographs. We check the images arrive legible on the job record. We check the confirmation text. We test the phone number taps to dial. We check the pages load in under two seconds.
Stage 8: review and launch
You get a live preview link and one round of changes. We ask for them in one list rather than in messages across a week, which is the difference between a two-day review and a two-week one.
Then we point the domain, which stays in your name, set up tracking for form submissions and calls, and hand over a recorded walkthrough of how to edit the prices and the coverage areas yourself.
Stage 9: the first month
We look at the numbers with you once. Which pages produced enquiries, how many quote forms were completed against how many were started, and whether the area pages are picking up anything.
The usual first fix is not a design change. It is a field removed from the form, or the chip price moved higher up the page.
Where this sits
Our auto glass websites run to this process at a fixed price, including the quote form, the insurance and ADAS pages and the tool wiring. The wider trade version is on the automotive page. Four hours of your time, and the photographs are the part to book early.