Coroil

A car restoration and servicing workshop in Orléans, whose craft is judged on photographs and not on paragraphs. The trade is visual by nature: a restored vehicle is shown, not narrated.

The difficulty of a website for this kind of workshop lies exactly there. You have to show a great many images without the page becoming slow, and the workshop has to be able to add a job without calling us.

The art direction commits to a vintage americana register, coherent with the trade and with the vehicles that come through. It is not decoration: it is what makes an enthusiast recognise the place within a second, and a passing customer understand the level of the workshop.

Every piece of work has a before-and-after comparison, with two distinct images per job. It is the format that demonstrates the work fastest, by a long way. A photo of the result impresses; a before and after proves.

The home page is driven entirely by editable fields. The workshop adds a job, fills in the fields, and the page builds itself without the layout moving.

Every service card and every feature of the workshop carries its own icon, drawn for this project and aligned with the art direction. It is a detail that costs time and separates a site that was designed from a site that was assembled: on an off-the-shelf theme, those icons would all be identical.

Handling the images is the real technical work. A car restoration site is a site of heavy images by nature. They are compressed, served in the right format and at the right size, and loaded only when they reach the screen.

Measurable result: the home page serves twenty-four images and responds in 0.15 seconds, measured on 8 September 2026.

A workshop that can publish its own jobs does publish them. That is the point that decides whether a site like this stays alive: without editorial independence, the gallery freezes on delivery day and the site ages within six months.

The before-and-after format also changes the nature of the visit. A visitor scrolling through comparisons spends longer on the site and reaches the contact form with a precise idea of what to ask for. The enquiry that comes out of it is better qualified.

Finally, speed counts twice over here: half the visitors to a local site arrive from a phone, often on an average connection, and a slow gallery is a gallery nobody looks at.

The site was built from a mockup produced beforehand, then brought into our technical foundation and made editable. The project then moved to complete independence: it no longer carries any dependency on our internal framework and lives its own life.

It is a choice that costs something at the moment of the switch and protects the client afterwards. A site that depends on its agency's foundation is a site whose supplier cannot be changed without starting again.

Acceptance testing is followed on a shared board, ticket by ticket, with a link to the fix when there is one.

A home page that serves twenty-four images poses a problem most workshop sites do not solve. Loaded as they are, those images run to several megabytes and the page takes several seconds to appear on a phone.

Three measures answer it, and they are taken during the build and not afterwards. The images are converted to a modern format and served at their real display size, not their original size. Those off screen only load as they approach. And the before-and-after comparison only loads its second image when it becomes visible.

Measured on 8 September 2026: 0.15 seconds of response time, for a page of fifty-one kilobytes of code. That is what lets a gallery be looked at instead of abandoned.