Appraisals of specialty and vintage cars

Website: OceansideAutoAppraiser.com
Business: Specialty auto appraiser
Purpose: Provide information about company services, Information about why different kinds of appraisals are a good idea, and online booking and completion of auto and motorcycle appraisals.

David Sampson, a name you may remember from other posts about slot-car racing and radio-control car racing, is someone I’ve known since grade 9. He’s the owner of Oceanside Auto Appraisers, a business that’s been based from his Vancouver Island home for several years.

David’s always been a car aficionado (read: nut) and has managed to find himself a niche in which he gets to hobble around with all sorts of vintage, classic, and exotic cars. He’s the number-one appraiser on the island and has appraised all sorts of jaw-dropping cars (he sometimes sends me pictures just to gloat…), including John Lennon’s Rolls Royce!

Dave wanted an update of his existing site. He also wanted to start a new facet of his business: to use the reach of his website to help owners of special vehicles buy and sell the car of their dreams.

Set up as a kind of high-end Auto Trader, the new part of the site lists car profiles for their owners and helps get buyers and sellers together so they can make the deal. Car owners can list their car on the site for a small charge for eight weeks at a time.

Each car listing tells the history of the car, the details of the engine and other options, and includes a gallery of high-resolution pictures of the machine. Potential buyers simply contact the owners directly to ask further questions and try to make a deal.

Dave knows about cars, but not so much about websites.

We built the site with the express intent of making it easy for him to create, modify, and delete car ads — that way he can react quickly to market demands and keep the maintenance costs of the website down to near zero.

Using WordPress with the Elementor build tool allowed us to create the site in less than a month and take it live on January 3. You can check out the site at OceansideAutoAppraisers.com.

DerekCadzow.com creates imaginative, engaging websites for select clients. This series highlights some of those sites and tells you the story behind each of them. Got a project in mind? Please let us know about it from the contact page.