Koeppel Auto Group
Project Overview
Client: Koeppel Auto Group
Product: Auto-Group Portal Website
Collision Center Website
6 Individual dealership sites
7 Spanish dealership sites
Team: Implementation Consultant, Onboarding designer
Role: Onboarding Designer
Timeline: 3 Months
Steps: Project Intake; Contracting translation services; Mockups; project build/launch
Summary of Requirements
This client was transferring all of their online business from their current provider to our company and wanted to go through a rebranding process. They also wanted to build Spanish versions of all their sites because they have one of the highest Spanish speaking client base in New York. Their project requirements were less design focused and wanted us to come up with the site design for them. Their bigger concern was that all the page content from their existing site be brought over to the new websites. In addition, all the pages needed to be translated to Spanish and added to the Spanish websites.
Pre-Build
Translations | Mockups
The client had over 140 pages that needed translating and our company had not provided a translation service to this scale before. In order to keep the project moving I found a translation service and we reached out to them to contract out that work. All the text was scraped from the existing websites and formatted in a document and sent over to the translation company for the 4 week translation timeline.
The mockup phase was a bit different for this client due to the tight turnaround time. Instead of iterating on different designs, I came up with a basic design scheme with colors, image treatments, etc. and built a mock homepage using the data I already had surrounding best practices. This was presented to the client and they approved the design. From there my design team helped copy that design for the other 13 websites. My role from there was to manage quality control, ensuring everything looked correct and implementation of the Spanish content. I worked with one of our internal SEO team members who was a fluent Spanish speaker to QA the content and ensure we were plugging each sentence into the correct spot.
Final Product
The 14 Koeppel websites were launched over the course of a month, the Spanish sites taking a bit longer to QA but overall a successful project. After a site is launched the dealer has the freedom to make any changes they want at any time, and these sites have remained largely unchanged for almost 2 years now (as of 2023).
Retrospective
While the project was successful, this was a good learning opportunity for our onboarding team. We ran into some challenges with the commitment in building the Spanish websites and the client graciously worked with us as we sorted out those hiccups. What came out of it was a newly established process for mass translations and better understanding the scope of work for performing these services. This process has helped us smoothly execute multiple Spanish launches since then and set realistic timelines for those sites.