DW Panel & Painting is a collision repair workshop in Wairau Valley on Auckland's North Shore. They handle panel beating, spray painting, insurance repairs, chassis straightening and more. They needed a website that explains all of that clearly, ranks for local searches and makes getting a quote as easy as possible.
The brief
Most people looking for a panel beater have just had a bad day. They want three things fast: can you fix it, roughly what will it cost, and how do I get it booked in. The site had to answer those on a phone, in a few taps.
What we built
A quote form that works with photos. Customers can upload up to eight photos of the damage with their enquiry. Photos are compressed automatically, sent to the workshop by email as attachments and archived on the server, so nothing is lost if an email bounces.
Ten service pages. Each service — from collision repair and rust repair to ADAS calibration and 3D vehicle measuring — has its own page, written around how customers actually describe the problem.
Real photos only. We used the workshop's own photos throughout and blurred licence plates where needed. There are no stock images of someone else's garage.
Built for phones. A fixed bar at the bottom of the screen keeps "Call" and "Free quote" one tap away on every page.
A blog they can run themselves. New articles are plain text files. Articles include one on 3D vehicle measuring, illustrated with photos from the workshop.
Chinese version, ready when they are. The full Chinese translation is built in. It's switched off for now and can be turned on with a single setting, which also updates the language switcher, sitemap and search engine tags.
Search engines
Local search is where panel beaters win or lose work, so SEO was part of the build, not an add-on:
- A unique title and description for every page, written for North Shore and Wairau Valley searches
- Structured data that tells Google this is an auto body shop, what services it offers and how pages relate to each other
- Clean canonical URLs, an automatic sitemap and correct language tags
- Thank-you and error pages kept out of search results
We deliberately left out ratings and prices that hadn't been confirmed. Structured data should only say what's true.
Under the hood
The site is rendered on the server with Node.js and Express. That keeps it fast on older phones and easy for search engines to read. It runs in Docker in both development and production, and every form email can be tested locally before it goes anywhere near a real inbox.
The result
The workshop now has a site that explains every service clearly, collects enquiries with photos attached, and is set up to compete in local search. It can also grow into a second language without a rebuild.
Launch isn't the finish line
For a lot of web agencies, handing over the website is the end of the job. For us, it's where the next part starts.
Every six months, we send DW Panel & Painting a traffic report: how many people visited, where they came from, and which searches and pages brought them in. Each report comes with practical SEO recommendations — which service pages to strengthen, what to write about next, and what to change based on what the numbers show.
A website should keep bringing in work long after launch. Our goal isn't just to deliver a site. It's to help the business grow.