Smithy’s is a long-running Bundaberg dealership run by one man, with limited computer experience — the classic old-school car dealer. He came to us wanting something simple: a brochure site to put the business online.
Once we talked it through, it was clear a brochure wouldn’t cut it. Smithy needed a living inventory — current cars, current prices, current specs, changing daily — and he needed to run it himself, without ever touching a WordPress dashboard or calling a web designer.
So instead of posts and pages, we built him a single form. He typed in the make, model, year and colour, and the system offered him the right options for that type of vehicle to tick off — nothing to write from scratch, nothing to format. Hit publish, and the car was on the site with its own page, the price shown clearly and every option easy to see. Think carsales.com.au, cut down to exactly what one dealer and his buyers needed, and built around the way Smithy works.
The results spoke for themselves. Within a week, Smithy had mapped every car on his lot into the system himself. Within two, he was making sales online. His yard had sat quietly on a relatively unknown side street, well away from the big dealership strips — once the site matured, that stopped mattering. He was properly on the map, and pulling in more foot traffic than the location had ever generated on its own.
We returned in 2012 to sharpen the experience further: cleaner image handling with no manual cropping required, new sliders to spotlight featured and newly-listed stock, and up to nine promotable slots across the home page.
Alongside the site, we produced a series of marketing videos built entirely around Smithy himself — leaning into his straight-talking, larger-than-life personality rather than smoothing it over. They did more than move cars: Smithy became something of a local character because of them, recognised around Bundaberg in a way a website alone was never going to manage on its own.
Smithy doesn’t mince words, and his verdict on the whole thing was characteristically blunt: it was the easiest way to put cars on the internet, a dead-set no-brainer, and it made his life a lot easier.
