Their old site wasn’t working
Evans Mechanical Services Inc. provides towing and roadside repair in western New York State. They noticed their competitors were getting listed higher in Google and asked me to help them fix their website. Here’s what it looked like when I first visited the site:
Yes there was a giant image with the company’s name that filled all the space above the fold. It was slightly better on an iPhone:
Unfortunately, the navigation menu was completely obscured in that version and people had to scroll down the page (with giant images getting loaded along the way) to find the links to the pages they wanted to visit. Given that the majority of their potential customers are stuck on the side of the road, it’s critical their site will work on a phone.
The other problem with the site is that employees couldn’t edit it. There’s a gallery page, but only the designer of the page could upload new photos. It was essentially frozen in time, which is a problem since Google prefers fresh content.
There was a contact form, but it didn’t send emails to everyone who needed to see them. They wanted to gather reviews from satisfied customers, but many found the process of writing a reviews on Google overly complicated. So they wanted forms for posing reviews and contacting several representatives at once.
“What about Discourse?”
It seemed to me that the most difficult part of building the site was accepting content from people without an account, so I started researching what would be required to create a contact form. I’d used Formspree for my own business, but it gets pretty expensive if you expect to get more than a handful of submissions.
Given I was already paying for a server, I wondered if I could set up my own form handler. Since my client wanted a review function that would need to accept submissions from anyone who has an email address, I needed to set up something that would handle both types of submissions.
I still needed to let representatives edit the site. That got me thinking about WordPress even though it’s not the best choice. Learning yet another technology stack made me feel queasy. So I slowly began considering the idea of just using Discourse. It has been a decent blogging platform for me lately and if WordPress can go from blogging platform to the most common CMS on the internet, what’s to stop me from forcing forum software into that function too?
So I created a Discourse plugin for contact forms and then a review plugin based on the same technique. Discourse doesn’t normally allow unregistered users to post, but I hijacked the system for allowing users to send emails to support systems hosted on Discourse. Is it perfect? No, but it’s good enough for this purpose.
Next I stripped away the bits of the site that made it look like a forum rather than a business site. For that I created the clean published pages theme component. Any topic tagged published would no longer have:
- the Discourse header
- post controls
- sidebar
- category
- navigation
- related posts
- meta data
- footer
- avatars
- notices
- menus
To replace all that missing navigation, I created a header and a footer theme component. To make sure every page had the business’ phone number, I created a banner with it in a big, bold font. The resulting page won’t win any design awards, but it does the job:
Finally I tweaked a few other settings such as creating permalinks and submitting the sitemap to Google via their search console.
Early results
The other day the owner got a call from a driver who was stuck in Dunkirk, NY. The driver told the owner that he’d used his iPhone to search “heavy tow” and Evans was the top result. That’s exactly what the business needs.
We also started getting contacts from customers via the site and a few reviews. Now that it’s so easy to submit a review, the drivers are getting 3x5 cards with the site’s URL to give to satisfied customers. More reviews means more activity which means Google puts the site higher in the search results.
Is this a community?
Discourse is community software, so is there a community here? Generally towing customers don’t generate repeat business. If you kinda squint you can image a “community of stuck motorists and stranded truckers”. But that’s not really the best way to think of this.
Instead I’m using Discourse as connection software. Communities can only form when people discover their connections. Nobody wants to be the customer of a towing and roadside repair shop, so there’s not a lot of potential for passionate customers. But reviews allow a kind of ships-passing-in-the-night community that form when the common bond is trouble. Not a lasting community, if you can help it, of course.
More important, the site connects people in need with the business that provides a solution. There’s a nobility in doing a job that needs doing even if, especially if, it’s not particularly glamorous.