Creation of a website for a car repair shop

As a start-up or existing garage owner, you may see the website as secondary, but a website can make a big difference to the visibility of your garage and literally put you on the map in Google Maps and the Google search engine. Thanks to software like WordPress, creating a website yourself is no longer a big challenge these days. In this blog post, we'll look at how you can do it yourself. This will help you avoid the potentially high costs that a website entails. Let's go!

Choosing a hosting package and domain name

If you want to start creating a website for an auto repair shop, there are a few things you need to think about before you begin. There are a variety of options and packages you can use to tackle this. In this article, however, we want to focus on creating a WordPress website for your garage. WordPress is a content management system that allows you to create your website in a visual way. This means that you don't need any coding knowledge to do this, but can simply work in the same way as you can in Microsoft Word, for example. WordPress is designed in such a way that you can easily get started with it and achieve a beautiful result with a little homework.

WordPress is supported by almost all of our packages, but we recommend either the Total SSD hosting package for this. Or one of our Managed WordPress hosting packages. The difference is that with a Total SSD hosting package, you are still responsible for the maintenance and security of your website. With a Managed WordPress hosting package, we take care of this for you. Pay attention to what is important to you and also check your own willingness to work regularly with your website. After all, the maintenance and work on a website is never finished, and with Managed WordPress Hosting you can make it easier for yourself.

The domain name is the address where your website can be found, and can be almost anything you want it to be. The important thing is that you include the name of your workshop in it, and that you keep it as short as possible and don't use any strange characters or numbers.

Start by creating your website

Once you've ordered your domain name and package, you can start setting up the necessary things, such as setting up your email addresses with your own domain name. And install WordPress on your hosting package. With hosting from MijnHostingPartner.nl, you can easily do all this via the customer panel, and we have extensive knowledge base articles to guide you through the process. We have created our own instruction videos for both creating email addresses and installing WordPress. You can watch these at your leisure.

Once you have completed the installation of WordPress, we recommend that you take some time to go through all the menu options and familiarize yourself with the various possibilities. You will then be able to switch more easily in the following steps.

Select your theme

The theme in WordPress determines the design and layout of the website, so this is an important decision that requires some homework. Write down for yourself what you want to see on the website and how you envision it. Different themes have different functions. Thousands of free themes can be downloaded directly from WordPress, or you can opt for a paid theme from a third-party provider. With a paid theme, more is often possible, and in most situations you make things a little easier for yourself. Themes often cost around 50 euros, although there are of course also top values.

So check whether your theme is regularly updated and is rated highly by other users. We recommend that you do not install themes indiscriminately, as this can lead to contamination and even pose a security risk, even with inactive themes.

Fill your website with content

A website stands and falls with the content you place on it. Content can take many forms and is, for example, written text, images, audio or video. All of these types of content can be used for your garage website. For example, think of the text on the website that explains the procedure and prices of the various maintenance jobs. Images can of course show the latest cars you have on offer, as well as the garage and the team itself. Videos can show your latest work or vehicles in great detail to entice potential buyers into the vehicles. And audio can be a podcast, for example, where you use the expertise of your team to create a radio show of sorts. All of this content can also be promoted on your social media channels. In this way, you can use your content to promote your workshop.

A lot of this content can be created using tools and equipment you already have at your disposal, just a decent microphone is a sensible investment to get good quality audio. Of course, everyone has a smartphone these days, with even the mid-range models having a good camera available.

Offering cars on your own website

There are several ways to offer the cars from your range on your website. Perhaps the easiest is to simply link or embed the program, website or software on your own website. Then you can simply continue to use the resources you already use. You can also use WordPress and WooCommerce to offer cars via a webshop. And some themes specifically for car repair shops or dealers already have this functionality built in.

So take a look at the different options and choose the one that works best for you. You can always change this later if you are still missing features.

Are you ready to create your own website? Get the right foundation and buy a hosting package from MijnHostingPartner.nl!