Autoschade Merkelbag

Autoschade Merkelbag is a family-run auto body repair shop in Maastricht that has been in business since 1968. It was founded by Ger Merkelbag and is run today by his sons Pascal and Roderic. I designed and built their website: a calm, trustworthy home for a business whose customers usually arrive stressed, right after an accident, looking for someone honest to fix their car.

The brief

Most visitors land on the site at a bad moment. They have just had a crash, they are dealing with their insurer, and they need quick reassurance that their car is in capable hands. So the site leads with people instead of jargon: the real team, a real workshop, direct phone and WhatsApp contact, and an obvious "report your damage" path. Everything is in Dutch, written in a friendly but professional tone.

Design

The design is built around the brand's character: warm, expert, and trusted. A navy base carries the authority, a coral accent adds energy on the calls to action, and real workshop photography runs throughout instead of stock images. Headings are set in the Bitter serif for warmth, with Source Sans 3 keeping the body text clean and readable. The standout asset is a genuine photo of the twelve-person team standing in their own workshop, which does more for trust than any tagline could.

Built around a CMS

The whole site is content-managed through Sanity, so the owners can keep it up to date themselves without touching code. Three content types are wired up: blog posts for the news section, job vacancies for the careers page, and a single "site settings" document for global details like opening hours and contact info. Articles and vacancies each generate their own pages and feed paginated overview lists automatically.

How it was built

The front end is Astro 6 in TypeScript strict mode, which ships almost no JavaScript and keeps the site fast. Content is pulled from Sanity at build time and rendered as static pages. The contact form and the job application form (with CV upload) both deliver email through Resend via Astro API routes, with a honeypot field to keep spam out. It is hosted on Vercel with Google Analytics, Vercel Analytics, and Speed Insights for monitoring, plus a generated sitemap and robots.txt for SEO, and a cookie consent banner that loads analytics only after opt-in.

Other touches: a floating WhatsApp button for quick contact, an FAQ section, insurance and certification logos (the shop is recognized by nearly all Dutch insurers and is Plusnorm and AVH certified), and dedicated pages for the services, the team's story, and the legal pages.