Goolsby Customs Redesign & Development

Six Years of Growth Changed What the Website Needed

Goolsby Customs is an award-winning custom car builder based in Hueytown, Alabama, creating high-end muscle cars, hot rods, and restored vehicles for customers across the country.

I originally built and launched their previous custom WordPress website ahead of the 2019 SEMA Show.

Over the next six years, the site grew alongside the business. What started as a much smaller portfolio expanded to more than 50 featured builds and over 13,000 media uploads. The original Elementor-based site had served them well, but the design was showing its age, some layouts had degraded over time, and increasingly image-heavy build galleries needed better performance.

It was time to rebuild around what Goolsby Customs had become.

Rethinking the Build Gallery

The vehicles are the star of the website, so the redesign started with figuring out how visitors should browse and experience them.

We explored multiple approaches to the homepage and build archives before settling on a new structure. I also revisited the way projects were classified and organized now that the portfolio had grown to roughly 55 builds.

New taxonomy structures make it easier to organize the collection and provide more useful browsing, filtering, and sorting options on the front end.

Individual galleries also had to perform better. Some builds contain more than 400 images, making image handling and page performance an important part of the rebuild.

Rebuilding the Foundation

I migrated the existing site into a development environment and rebuilt the front end using Bricks and ACSS, removing the site’s dependency on Elementor.

The redesign included:

• Strategy and client interviews
• UI/UX exploration
• Complete visual refresh
• WordPress development
• New build taxonomy and content structures
• Migration of existing projects and content
• Migration and organization of 13,000+ media files
• Improved build gallery presentation
• New career and hiring content
• Easier management of news and editorial content
• WooCommerce support for apparel and specialty products
• Testing, QA, launch, and ongoing management

For editorial content, I intentionally moved news and posts away from requiring a page builder. The default WordPress block editor now gives the client a simpler and more future-friendly way to publish regular content.

An SEO Decision That Kept Paying Off

One of the more interesting parts of this project actually started with the original website in 2019.

We knew from the beginning that photography would be one of Goolsby Customs’ most valuable digital assets. Their finished builds are highly visual, highly searchable, and exactly the type of content enthusiasts look for.

We established a consistent image-naming approach that incorporates details like the vehicle year, make, model, and Goolsby Customs name.

That process has now been applied across thousands of images and has helped make Google Image Search an ongoing source of visibility and traffic for the business.

Today, Google Search Console reports an average of 30,000+ search impressions and 600+ clicks per month.

Built for What Comes Next

The redesigned site reflects a business that has evolved too.

Goolsby Customs has moved away from smaller maintenance work to focus on complete custom builds. The new site puts those projects front and center while giving the team a stronger platform for documenting new work as it comes through the shop.

I’ve continuously managed the Goolsby Customs website since 2019, and that relationship continues with the redesigned site today.