The company
Mirage Automotive are a British Sportscar manufacturer who have expertly crafted The Mirage GT.
Using a combination of iconic classical styling and 21st century engineering and manufacturing they have been able to build a car that is not only good on the track but also on the road.
I was contacted by Matthew Potts, from Mirage Automotive, who I have worked with in the past as he is also a backend developer.
He asked me to create a visually stunning design and to also build the frontend of the website so I could then pass on to him to build into his own bespoke CMS.
The Requirements
- The website must work well on both desktop and mobile
- The website must use imagery to showcase the car and all of its features.
- It must catch the eye of the user and give a classy and professional feel
- It must be easy to use and have a balance of good information with high quality images.
- It must showcase the process from start to finish so potential buyers can see how the car is constructed.
- The website must feel high class and reflect their branding.
My process
The first thing I did was take a look at other high end dealers and manufacturers to get a feel and idea of what sort of design and layout to use.
I then sketched out some basic layout ideas on paper and sent these over to Matthew to give him an idea of what I was thinking of doing. I wanted to use a mix of good content which had lots of imagery straight on the main page, showing how the car looked on the outside, but also how it looked on the inside.
I added a section on the homepage that would link to a page showing videos of all of the different build process, this enabled the customer to see the full life cycle of the product and to show the time and care that is taken for each car that is crafted.
We finished the homepage with a news section, this was a great place to show the user the latest news, which could include recent magazine features and events that the car was to be shown to the public.
I then passed over my work to Matthew and he was then responsible for moving my frontend HTML, CSS and jQuery into his custom CMS that has built.
The final result
When I showed the final result to Matthew he was very impressed and pleased with the product. All of the main points that he wanted to show to the user were covered and the site felt professional, easy to use and showed the brand exactly how he had envisaged.
Retrospective
This is one of my favourite websites that I have worked on. I enjoyed the full process from start to finish. Since working on this project I have been reading up on UX and looking back now, I would have liked to have used some user testing on this site to make sure that all of the key points were relayed to the user.
Chris listened to and created a fantastic design concept. He helped to evolve the designs and created an easy to use website.