A review site lives or dies on two things: whether the person writing it can publish without friction, and whether anyone can find the review two years after it went up. Neither is a design problem. Both are build decisions made early.
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The client
Hugh Maguire runs whichnewcar.ie, an Irish new-car review site. He is a motoring journalist with many years of road-testing experience, a member of the MMAI, and sits on the Irish Car of the Year jury.
What he needed was a platform that could keep up with him: somewhere to publish considered, detailed reviews every week, that readers could actually search, and that did not require him to think about the technology behind it.
What was built
- A custom WordPress build, designed around how people actually read car reviews: find the model under consideration, read it properly, then find the comparable one.
- A publishing workflow the owner runs himself. Reviews go up weekly without developer involvement, which was the point. A site that depends on whoever built it being available is a site with a single point of failure.
- Search and discovery built for a growing archive, so a review from two years ago stays as findable as one from last week.
- Technical SEO foundations, because a review site earns its readers through search or it does not earn them at all.
- Image handling suited to the content. Car reviews are photography-led, and photography-led sites live or die on how images are served.
Keeping it running
Hosting and upkeep are handled as part of the arrangement. Updates, security and the day-to-day maintenance sit on this side of the relationship, and changes get requested by message rather than filed into a ticketing system.
Where the site goes next is a regular conversation. He knows motoring journalism, and the platform side is covered here. Most of the good decisions have come out of that combination rather than either side working alone.
He prefers meeting in person, which works well. A lot gets settled in an hour that would otherwise take a fortnight of email.
Result
A site its owner can run without thinking about it, publishing every week, with an archive that keeps earning readers long after each review goes up.
That is the outcome worth aiming at on any build: the client gets on with the work they are actually good at, and the technology stays out of the way.
Two things in this build are worth generalising. The publishing workflow mattered more than the design, which is usually true and rarely how these projects are scoped. And the technical foundations were built in at the start rather than retrofitted, which is the difference the wide price bands are actually describing.
Keeping it maintained is the unglamorous half. A site left alone accumulates risk quietly, which is less about WordPress than about what gets installed on top of it.
If you are considering something similar and want an honest view on whether it is the right shape for your business, describe what you are trying to achieve. The wider approach is on the small business website design page.