Company profile

• Truck Toyz is an extremely well known truck customization shop that has clients all over North America
• Truck Toyz has had several of it’s client’s vehicles be featured in magazine articles
• Truck Toyz is one of the largest retailers of Ford SuperDuty suspension kits in the country

Business situation

Truck Toyz had been in business for years, and had no formal advertising in place, only word of mouth. The owner decided that due to the specialized nature of his business, that a web site would be ideal as a method of making people aware of his company and letting them see examples of the work performed by the shop.

Technical situation

As we began to talk with the client about what his vision for the website was, special requirements quickly began to take shape.

• A Homepage with dynamic or rotating photos and news headlines
• Flash based menus for capturing the interest of younger buyers
• An online photo gallery to show off photos of recent installations, events, customer submitted vehicles, and bloopers
• The ability to select a specific vehicle to be displayed as a Feature Truck on the website
• The ability to enter news articles and photos
• Automatic archival of older news items
• Easy to use FAQ section
• A section for downloading PDF copies of instruction sets for products sold

Solution

Knowing that the client’s ideal website was heavy on eye candy, we knew that just about everything in the site would need to be custom built. We decided to utilize a combination of Flash, PHP, and JavaScript since this would definitely allow us the flexibility that was needed.

Since we had a site map established, we started by building a full set of Flash based menus with animations for the main navigation and every section. The photo gallery system capacity is limited only by the amount of server space available. Special features of the photo gallery include the ability to manage photos for installations performed by the shop, photos submitted by site visitors, photos from shows that the company attended, and bloopers or miscellaneous photos.

Benefits

The completed project was an instant success. The site is dynamic and engaging, easy to use, and easy to administer. The image fit very well with the client’s expectations and the organization itself. The photo gallery system is very unique, and has been the focal point of the majority of feedback concerning the site. The news items run on the home page and automatically archive themselves so that the news page is never cluttered. The technical information and FAQs on the site are easy to use and easy to find information in. Overall, the site was everything the owner hoped for.