EBB & Baja Garage: one family, two personalities

The brief

One owner, two workshops: EBB in Guanajuato and Baja Garage in Aguascalientes. Neither branch had a website, and they were setting up their social media at the same time, so the sites had to be the professional home that everything else points back to.

The ask was specific. They wanted both sites to look the same, so customers would feel it's the same company, the same family, but with each branch keeping its own personality.

What I delivered

They supplied their logos, brand guidelines and photos. I handled everything else, from domains and hosting through to launch:

• Domains and hosting

  Registered and set up for both branches, so each has its own address.

• One WordPress build

  Home, services, about and contact pages, with a detail page for every service each branch offers.

• Two brand themes

  Each branch styled from its own logo and brand guidelines: colours, type and personality.

• Content and photos

  Their own photos, topped up with a few stock images where a service needed one.

• Ways to get in touch

  A spam-protected contact form, phone, email and opening hours on every page, and their social profiles linked in.

• Mobile first

  Built for phones first, since that’s where most people look for a workshop.

One system, two brands

Rather than building two separate websites, I built one site system and styled it twice. The structure, page layouts and content model are shared; the logo, colours, typefaces and details are each branch's own. EBB is cool navy with clean, light type; Baja Garage is bold red with a sharper, more technical feel.

• Consistency for free. Both sites behave the same way, so the business feels like one family wherever a customer lands.
• Each branch still stands on its own. Its own domain, phone number, hours, city and services. Baja Garage offers bodywork and paint, so its site has a page EBB's doesn't.
• Cheaper to build and maintain. Work done once, like a new page layout or a fix, can be carried across to the other site instead of being rebuilt.

The trap with twin sites

Sharing a system has one classic risk: text written for one branch quietly ends up on the other. While putting this case study together I found exactly that, a line on Baja Garage's homepage that still named EBB's city. It was fixed the same day.

It's a small thing, but it's what a customer notices. The lesson: with twin sites, every change needs checking on both for anything that belongs to only one of them.

Results

About 60 hours of work took the business from no web presence to two live, mobile-first websites, each with its own domain, a full set of service pages and a direct way for customers to get in touch. Every social profile now has a proper home to point to.