H-Town Auto BuyersCash for cars, Houston.

The job

People selling a car for cash tend to go with whoever answers first. The site needed to make calling, texting or asking for an offer the easiest thing on every page, especially on a phone, and get each request in front of the owner straight away.

What I built

• Built for phones first. Call, text and offer buttons stay in reach at the bottom of the screen on every page.
• An offer form that never gets in the way. Year, make and model are searchable lists checked against the federal NHTSA vehicle database. Anything typed that is not on the list still goes through, so an unusual car never blocks a lead.
• An asking price box. Sellers can say what they are hoping to get, so the owner knows before calling them back.
• Pages for what people actually search. A page for each kind of vehicle the business buys, pages for popular models and for the towns around Houston, and guides to the paperwork that comes with selling a car in Texas.

htownautobuyers.com

Behind the scenes

• Leads by text. Every offer request is texted to the owner with the name, number, asking price and car, and saved in an admin panel with the full details. The lead is saved first, so a failed text can never lose it.
• Spam kept off the owner's phone. Bots and cold sales pitches are filtered out before anything is sent, with limits per visitor and per day.
• Search. Structured data, a sitemap that always matches the site, Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, and new pages sent to Bing as soon as they are saved.
• Hosting. Runs on my own servers behind Cloudflare, with traffic limited to the United States and search engine crawlers always let through.

Built with

Next.js, React, Tailwind CSS, Prisma and SQLite, served by nginx behind Cloudflare.