Website Design for 70s Car Restoration
Written by Peter Skitt, Creative Director of Buzz Design
70s Car Restoration is a classic car and motorcycle restoration business based in West Yorkshire, working on vehicles from the late 1960s through the early 1980s, a period that produced some of Britain’s most characterful machines. Services span everything from re-sprays and full restoration to modification, customising, specialist part manufacture for components no longer commercially available, and maintenance contracts for owners who simply want a reliable classic to enjoy.
The business is Peter Skitt’s own second venture, running alongside Buzz Design. Designing and building a website for a business you own is a genuinely different challenge to client work — and it was approached with the same professional discipline applied to any Buzz Design project, regardless of the personal connection.
Challenges
Building a website for your own business introduces a specific risk: the temptation to let personal preference drive decisions rather than what actually serves the business. The discipline required to brief yourself properly, set aside assumptions, and evaluate the outcome as a client rather than an owner is harder to maintain than it sounds.
The classic vehicle community is knowledgeable, passionate, and highly attuned to authenticity. A site that tries too hard to look polished, or that uses the wrong language, or that does not reflect a genuine understanding of the vehicles and the culture around them, will be identified and dismissed quickly.
The breadth of services — restoration, re-spray, modification, part manufacture, maintenance — needed to be communicated without the site feeling unfocused. Each service is genuinely different; the challenge was to present that range as comprehensive capability rather than a scattered offering.
Design Process
The project was briefed and scoped with the same rigour applied to external clients — written brief, defined objectives, a clear target audience profile. The visual language developed for the site drew on the character and design culture of the era the business specialises in: classic and distinctive, with personality, but never tipping into nostalgia-kitsch.
Project gallery architecture was planned carefully to support individual project pages each with its own photography, narrative, and restoration timeline creating a record of completed and in-progress work that serves as both portfolio and content marketing. Service sections were structured to help visitors quickly identify whether 70s Car Restoration could take on their vehicle and what the process would look like.
A philosophy page was developed to communicate the business’s values: customer first, passion for the work, full transparency including weekly progress updates and Sunday open days at the workshop.
Solutions
The site features a distinctive visual identity that reflects the character of the era without tipping into pastiche. Clear service sections cover restoration, re-spray, modification, specialist part manufacture, and maintenance contracts.
Individual project pages in the gallery provide detailed documentation of each restoration photography, narrative, and progress creating an authentic and compelling record of the work. The philosophy page communicates the business’s values in a voice that resonates with the classic vehicle community.
Results
70s Car Restoration launched with a website that reflects both the passion behind the business and the professional standard of the restoration work. The project gallery has been a particular success, giving the business a credible and detailed record of its completed and in-progress restorations.
The site has helped establish the business’s reputation within the classic vehicle community in West Yorkshire and beyond, bringing in enquiries from enthusiasts who have found the site and been impressed by the combination of documented work and clearly communicated values.
Lessons Learned
Building a website for your own business is harder than building one for a client. Objectivity is the first casualty of personal investment, and applying agency discipline to your own brief treating yourself as a client, briefing properly, and evaluating honestly requires deliberate effort. The temptation to shortcut the process is stronger when the consequences feel personal rather than professional.
Classic vehicle communities reward authenticity above everything else. A site that tries too hard, or uses the wrong language, or presents work without the specific detail that genuine enthusiasts want to see, will lose an audience that has very good instincts for spotting the difference between passion and performance.
Project documentation is content marketing at its most effective in the restoration sector. A detailed, well-photographed project log does more trust-building work than any promotional page because it shows, rather than tells, exactly what the business is capable of.
Start your web design project today
If you’re thinking about a new website, or you know your current one isn’t doing the job it should, let’s talk. Call us, email us, WhatsApp us, or fill in this form and we’ll get back to you shortly.