The phone call that costs a garage its morning
Every independent garage has the same interruption. Someone rings to ask what an MOT costs on a 2016 Focus, or whether you can do a cambelt, or when their test runs out. Each call pulls a technician out from under a car or a manager off a job sheet, and most of them end without a booking.
The information the caller wants is not secret. It is the make, the model, the MOT expiry date and a price. All of it is either on the DVLA record or on a price list pinned to the office wall. The reason people ring is that the website will not tell them.
Most garage websites make it worse. They put a contact form where the price should be, so the only way to find out what something costs is to hand over your name, your number and your registration, and then wait. That is a form standing between a customer and a decision they were ready to make.
What I built instead
The registration field is the first thing on the page. Not a hero image, not a slider of stock photography, not a paragraph about family values since 2009. A box, and a prompt to put your plate in.
From there the site works out what the car is and when its MOT is due, then shows the price of every job it could need, on screen, before anything is confirmed. The booking is four short steps and ends with a reference number.
The plate goes first, above everything else
It is the one thing every visitor already knows and can type in three seconds. Leading with it means the site starts being useful before the customer has decided whether to trust you.
Prices are visible before the booking, not after it
Every job has its price on screen while you are choosing. The whole argument of the site is that you should be able to find out what something costs without speaking to anyone, so hiding the number behind a form would undo it.
Four steps, and you can see all four
Registration, what the car needs, when suits you, then your details. The progress is visible the whole way, so nobody abandons the booking because they cannot tell how much longer it will take.
Every error says what to do next
A plate in the wrong format, a date with no slots left, nothing selected yet. Each one gets its own message in place rather than a single red banner at the top, because a generic error just makes people leave.
A courtesy car is a checkbox, not a conversation
It is the question that usually forces a phone call. Putting it in the flow as an option removes the last reason to ring before booking.
The confirmation is a real receipt
Reference number, what was booked, when to arrive and what happens next. People screenshot this. It should be worth screenshotting.
What this kind of site will not do
It will not bring you customers who have never heard of you. A booking flow is for people who already found you, and it converts them instead of losing them to a phone call nobody answered. Discovery is a different job, done by your Google listing and by being genuinely good at cambelts. What this does is stop the people who already want you from giving up on the way in.
See it working
The sample is live and fully usable. Put a registration in, add things to a basket, go through the checkout. Nothing charges you and nothing is sent.