ELTA Automotive

ELTA Automotive came to us with one of the most demanding briefs we've encountered: a complete overhaul of a website that had to serve a vast product catalogue, multiple sub-brands, three distinct service propositions, and a technical buyer who needs to find the exact right part fast. Over three decades of growth, ELTA had assembled a portfolio that few competitors can match, including the iconic Lucas brand, their own VXPRO and VisionPRO ranges, Pride Classics for heritage vehicles, and more recent additions like Core, Autopal and the Serck cooling range. The existing site had been built incrementally over years and now struggled to do justice to any of it. Brands ran into each other, the catalogue was hard to navigate, and the internal team was spending significant time wrestling with the back end every time something needed updating. With the aftermarket becoming faster and more competitive, ELTA needed a digital platform that matched the calibre of the business.

The core challenge was structural rather than visual. ELTA's catalogue covers thousands of SKUs spread across more than ten product categories (braking, engine management, electrical components, fuelling, heating and cooling, ignition, lighting, mirror parts, warning and safety, wiper blades and more), and each of those categories is offered through multiple sub-brands targeting different market positions. A motor factor researching wiper blades, for example, might need to compare ranges across VisionPRO and Lucas, while a workshop hunting for a specific engine management sensor needs to land on the right VXPRO product page within seconds. The old site forced users to navigate by guesswork. There was no consistent taxonomy across brands, related products lived in unrelated places, and the relationship between the parent ELTA brand and the sub-brands wasn't clear.

The internal challenge was just as critical. ELTA's marketing team publishes regularly, including TechASSIST bulletins, vehicle profiles, news, downloads and new product launches, but the existing CMS made every update slower than it needed to be. Adding a new product range, launching a sub-brand campaign, or simply updating cross-links between related parts often required developer involvement. Any redesign therefore had to solve two problems at once: a customer-facing problem about findability and brand clarity, and an internal problem about long-term manageability. The new site also needed to coexist cleanly with the separate e-catalogue (catalogue.eltaeurope.com) that handles deep technical lookups, so the marketing site had to handle discovery and storytelling without duplicating catalogue functionality.

We started with a discovery phase covering stakeholder interviews across product, marketing, technical and sales teams, an audit of how buyers were actually using the existing site, and a full review of the catalogue and brand architecture. The strategic insight that came out of this work shaped the entire project: ELTA's sub-brands needed to be treated as first-class citizens within a consistent parent framework, not as standalone microsites bolted onto a corporate homepage. Every brand needed to feel distinct, but every product page needed to behave the same way, so that a buyer who'd learned to navigate VXPRO could find their way around Lucas without relearning the system.

From there, we rebuilt the information architecture from the ground up. Each sub-brand now has its own clearly defined section with a consistent navigation pattern, and product categories within each brand follow a unified taxonomy so that "Engine Management" or "Wiper Blades" behaves the same way wherever a user lands. Cross-brand discovery is handled through the main navigation and brand showcase, so motor factors can compare ranges across the portfolio without losing context. The three ASSIST services (TechASSIST, StockASSIST and BrandASSIST) were given their own architectural layer to make ELTA's value beyond distribution immediately visible, and the resources hub (news, bulletins, vehicle profiles, downloads) was restructured to support the team's ongoing content output rather than fight it.

The site was built on a custom WordPress theme with a modular block library and a deliberately pared-back set of editing patterns, so the marketing team can publish a new product page, sub-brand range, news article or technical bulletin without developer involvement. We worked closely with the internal team during build and ran CMS training as part of handover, because the long-term success of a catalogue this size depends on the team being able to maintain it confidently. SEO was built in from the foundations, with clean URL structures, schema markup and metadata templates set up at the brand and category level so new product pages inherit best practice automatically.