Two Sites. One Connected Brand World.

Will J’s Workshop is a New Zealand creative space that restores rare rides and forgotten treasures, which inspired a world of characters and stories.

It is not one business but three connected arms: the Workshop’s restorations and events, Rare Rides, and a Children’s Corner.

Rare Rides is the showcase and marketplace, a place to feature and market rare autos and craft. The Children’s Corner is home to Floyd and Otto, characters from a series of original children’s books. Each speaks to a different audience, but they are one creative universe, cross-linked so a visitor to one is naturally introduced to the rest.

The existing sites were built on WordPress and did not do the work justice.

They were slow, the layout fought the content, and the two brands read as unrelated rather than as one connected world. The SEO was poorly implemented.

The build carried real constraints. The content is film-heavy, with long-form videos that punish a slow host. And the client was on an existing hosting contract he wanted to keep, so the new sites had to launch on it without added cost and without a risky DNS cutover.

We rebuilt both sites from scratch in Next.js as fully static exports, matching each brand’s type and colour so the new sites felt like the real thing, only faster.

Every film was moved to Cloudflare R2 so long-form video streams cleanly instead of dragging page loads down.

Rare Rides gained a proper Buy & Sell section, with per-listing enquiries routed straight to the right inbox. We ran a full SEO and answer-engine pass, cross-linked structured data so the two brands read as one business to search engines, and used privacy-first analytics with no tracking cookies to honour the sites’ published privacy promise.

Both sites were then deployed onto the client’s existing hosting as plain static files, no new hosting bill and no DNS change on launch day.

Both sites went live on the same day.

Will J’s Workshop and Rare Rides now read as one connected story, each pointing visitors toward the other, with the Children’s Corner and its characters woven in.

The films stream fast, the marketplace is open for enquiries, and the whole thing runs as lightweight static pages on hosting the client already pays for. It is a foundation built to grow as the workshop, the marketplace, and the stories keep expanding.