A website that finally matches fourteen years of trust.
Hometown Hybrids is a mobile hybrid battery mechanic shop that has served the greater Houston, Austin, Dallas, and San Antonio areas for the last fourteen years. They are arguably one of the most trusted and reliable mobile hybrid mechanics in Texas, with a staggering 5-star rating across 300 reviews on their Google Business Profile alone. Their reputation is that of a shop that does right by its customers.
When Hometown Hybrids approached me about building them a new website, I had a lot of ideas. In my eyes, their old WordPress site was actively costing them leads. The style was dated and the whole thing felt unprofessional.
Worse than the look, the information a customer actually needed to make a decision was buried. Their pricing was hidden behind multiple pages and generally obscure, so figuring out whether to go with them or one of their competitors meant scrolling for a long time and digging through the site to find the few facts you needed before you would ever call. That kind of friction is exactly how a business loses leads over time.
Then there are the blogs. Their SEO was showing that the posts were getting plenty of hits, but those hits were not converting into clicks. To me that pointed at the plumbing. The Google Business Profile and Google Analytics were never set up correctly, so the traffic showed up in the numbers while the leads never followed.
What Hometown Hybrids really needed was a fast, maintainable website that could be updated in a flash. Something that was seamless for the user. Easy to navigate and easy to contact.
There was a second problem sitting underneath the first one. Most people have no idea what kind of hybrid they own, and even less of an idea what actually goes into a battery install. My goal was to take the average person who does not know much about cars and walk them through the process clearly enough that they could make an informed decision to go with Hometown Hybrids on their own.
The old site handled all of this with a single contact form buried under a pile of drop-down menus. It was old, it was very WordPress, and it did nothing to represent the sophisticated technology that a hybrid battery actually is.
When I designed the pricing calculator I had a couple of reference points in mind. I looked at how the top auto manufacturers and the leading mobile mechanic shops in the region were solving the same problem, and I structured my approach around what they were doing. That led to a battery pricing calculator that came out beautiful and easy to follow.
The customer is no longer burdened with knowing exactly what car they have. Now they just pick their make, choose from a handful of models, and confirm the exact one from a picture the moment they click. They also get to see what their hybrid battery actually looks like, which matters more than you would think. A lot of the Toyota batteries are nearly identical at a glance, and that similarity confuses people constantly.
Hometown Hybrids made one thing very clear to me. They wanted complete transparency on pricing for their batteries. Refurbished or new, every single battery has an exact price, and that price is never more than two to three clicks from the homepage.
The whole site is built so a customer can message or call the owner immediately and lock in an appointment. It is also very clear about what it is. Hometown Hybrids is an appointment-only mobile hybrid mechanic, and they are not afraid to say it. They want no confusion with their customers, so a bright orange "Appointment Only" banner sits right at the top of the page. The message could not be clearer.
The "Message Us" pill is a custom-built form that sends messages straight to the owner's phone as a text, using the P2P messaging service built into the backend of the site.
The blogs are arguably one of the most important pieces of the entire website. When you look at the Google Business analytics, they bring in most of the traffic. They are very specific and tailored. Some are written for people who have a certain code coming up on their car, and others are for people dealing with a hybrid-related issue who have no understanding of codes at all, or who just have a symptom or two of hybrid battery failure.
The blogs also highlight the other services Hometown Hybrids offers, and every one of them has calls to action baked in throughout, guiding the reader toward the pricing pages and the contact forms to book an appointment.
For the migration itself, I used Claude alongside Codex to scrape and identify each and every previous blog post from the old Hometown Hybrids site and port them over to the new one, with new styling and structure the old site never had. The layout matches the new aesthetic of the site, and I added a table of contents that moves with you as you scroll so you always know exactly where you are in the article. I also had each AI estimate how long the average reader would take to get through a post and put that reading time right at the top, so you know up front exactly how long the article will take to read.
That was the whole problem I set out to fix.