A Site that Provides National Validation for a Local Company

Jake’s is a Club Car-authorized dealer that can handle all of your golf cart related needs from sales, to rentals to repair and customization.

Jake’s wanted a professional and modern look, better search engine optimization and to highlight the reach of their company. They also had some technical challenges we needed to overcome as well as a few features on their “wishlist” that we had to build from scratch.

Priority #1: Site Security

Jake’s existing site was built on an ancient version of WordPress and an inventory management plugin that’s no longer maintained by its author. The site’s design was supported by a dozen or more plugins that are also no longer maintained. This led to malware infections on the site and potential search engine optimization penalties from Google.

This isn’t the most exciting topic and unfortunately there’s nothing to show you to demonstrate what we did, but the site’s security was our most-important challenge to overcome. In the new design we eliminated all but a handful of trustworthy, well-maintained plugins. We modified their inventory management plug-in ourselves to make it compatible with the latest version of WordPress.

Jake’s is now completely up-to-date, more difficult target for hackers to target and in a state we’re proud to hand off to the client.

Modern Design

Jake’s greatest desire was a professional, modern design that works well across any and all devices. At Reich Web Consulting, we understand just how important it is to get mobile right from the beginning. When you go with us, getting a mobile-friendly website isn’t an add-on feature; it’s a given. Every page of Jake’s new site works great on desktop, mobile and everything in between.

Jake’s new homepage features an image slider that’s a breeze for the client to edit themselves.

Search result pages feature a “masonry layout” that reorganizes itself to fit the size of your device, as well as a fully-customized search bar that docks to the top of the browser as you scroll. Speaking of the search bar, mobile visitors will get a unique experience. We realized early-on that leaving the search form fully-visible on mobile would push the search results off the screen and require the user to scroll to see the images of the carts they searched for. On small devices, the search form docks itself to the left of the screen and can be pulled into view or docked to the side again with a single touch.

Last: all forms look and work great on mobile.

Featured Carts

One of the features Jake’s really wanted was a mechanism to highlight particular carts on their homepage. We went ahead and created a checkbox field on their cart management page that will cause carts to display in a gallery on the homepage. When you have as much experience with customizing WordPress as we do, this sort of feature is actually pretty easy!

Customer Map

As part of the site redesign, Jake’s owners sought a way to highlight their nationwide reach. We gave them an easy way to do that by building a map on their homepage that gives a visual representation of their satisfied customers.  After a cart is marked as sold, an address field becomes available that lets them specify where the cart was delivered. The address widget then uses Google Maps to locate GPS coordinates, and adds it to the map on the homepage.

Another cool feature we created was a Google Map on the Rentals page that highlights the states that Jake’s delivers to. This allows customers from Norfolk to New York to instantly see that they’re within range of Jake’s rental delivery service.

Customer Reviews

Customer reviews inspire trust and validation. The new design provides customer reviews in a variety of ways. First, the homepage features a content slider towards the bottom that highlights a couple of recent reviews. Second, we’ve added a Customer Reviews page that lists even more reviews and provides a button that launches the Review Submission form from the customer’s CRM software.

Finally, Jake’s management likes to leave reviews and images of their happy customers in the homepage slider, and on the pages for their sold carts. Future customers that arrive at Jake’s website are sure to see that they’re a reputable company with a sterling reputation and hundreds of satisfied customers.

Manufacturer Details

The last item on Jake’s wishlist was a way to pull in the technical specifications for their carts direct from the manufacturer’s website. Unfortunately none of the manufacturers make this easy, but for Club Car, we found a way. We provided Jake’s with an additional field when editing their carts in which they could paste the manufacturer’s website address for that particular model. When that field is filled out, the page is downloaded and scraped for a table of technical details, which is saved and displayed at the bottom of the cart’s page on jakesgolfcarts.com

Summary

We’re very proud of the solution that Reich Web Consulting delivered to Jake’s Golf Carts. We were able to deliver  a solution that’s technically sound, safe and secure, has the basics of Search Engine Optimization correct from the beginning, is mobile friendly and is packed with a ton of awesome custom features.