The honest version
Two to three weeks, and about five hours of your time. The build never causes the delay. What causes the delay is the photography, because a body shop site is made of photographs and you need before-and-after pairs you probably have not shot to a standard yet.
Start that in week one, whatever else happens.
Stage 1: the first conversation
Forty-five minutes. We are working out how the shop actually earns, not what the site should look like.
What we ask: the split between insurer, dealer and private work, and which of the three you want more of. Whether you do smart repair and PDR, and whether you would take those jobs if the phone rang. Courtesy car position. Which approvals and certifications you genuinely hold. What management system you run.
What you get: a page list and a straight answer on whether you need anything beyond the standard build.
Stage 2: the photography standard, agreed early
The stage that decides the site.
We agree the four-shot standard: before from the worst angle, after from the identical angle, a close-up under raking light, and the gap or blend edge. We pick a spot in the shop where the light works and mark it, so every job gets photographed in the same place.
Then you start shooting the jobs going through this week. By launch we want ten to fifteen pairs across the damage types you want to sell.
Shops resist this stage more than any other and it is the one that changes the outcome most.
Stage 3: the estimate form
Half an hour. Six fields, four upload slots, the angle example images, and where the submission lands — Autoflow, Garage Hive, Shopmonkey, Tekmetric or your inbox with a text alert.
We also agree the promise that goes above the button: that the estimate is based on the photographs, and that if you find more you stop, photograph it, and wait for approval. That sentence is the difference between a form people trust and one they do not.
Stage 4: the insurance and guarantee answers
Thirty minutes, and you talk.
We need your position on claiming versus paying privately, with two real numbers to build the worked examples from. We need the guarantee in specifics: years, what it covers, what it excludes, whether it transfers. We need your paint process in three sentences and an honest note on which colours are difficult.
We draft both pages from that call. What comes back is usually a correction on the guarantee wording and nothing else.
Stage 5: the design direction
One round, two pages. We show the home page and a gallery job page, because that is where all the decisions live on a site like this.
One round of substantive change here, one at review. That constraint is why the timeline holds.
Stage 6: build
Six to eight working days.
Home page, accident repair, smart repair with prices, PDR with prices, alloy refurbishment if you do it, the gallery, the paint and guarantee page, the insurance-or-private page, courtesy cars and process, about, contact. The gallery is built as records so you can add a job from your phone in two minutes.
Stage 7: the image pipeline
The invisible stage that keeps the site fast.
Every gallery image is resized to what the layout shows, served in modern formats with a fallback, given real thumbnails, lazy-loaded below the fold, and given explicit dimensions so the page does not jump. A hundred jobs and still under two seconds on mobile data is the target, and it is achievable.
We also set plate cropping as the default and add the permission line to your authorisation paperwork.
Stage 8: review and launch
A live preview link and one round of changes, requested as a single list rather than messages across a fortnight.
Then the domain, which stays in your name, tracking on estimate submissions and phone taps, and a recorded walkthrough of how to add a gallery job and edit the smart repair prices yourself.
Stage 9: the first month
We look at the numbers once. Which pages produced enquiries, how many estimate forms were started against completed, and whether the smart repair and PDR pages are picking up searches.
The usual first fix is not a design change. It is a photograph standard slipping, or a field to remove from the form.
Where this sits
Our body shop websites run to this process at a fixed price, including the estimate form, the records gallery and the insurance and guarantee pages. The wider trade version is on the automotive page. Five hours of your time, and the photography is the part to start in week one.