Case Study: Wildfire Auto Transport

Wildfire Auto Transport, based in Carol Stream, Illinois, moves vehicles nationwide for corporate relocations, commercial fleets, and auction remarketing. I built two things for them: the public marketing website at wildfireautotrans.com, and a private operations portal that runs their order workflow.

It’s a good example of something I see often: a business that starts out needing “a website” but is really dealing with two separate problems.

Two problems, not one

Problem one: winning trust. Wildfire’s customers are businesses handing over expensive vehicles. Before they call, they want to know the company is established, understands their type of move, and is easy to reach. That’s a marketing website’s job.

Problem two: running the work. Behind the scenes, every order moves through a series of steps, and the team needs a single place to see where each one stands. No marketing website, however good, solves that. That’s a software problem.

Treating these as one project usually produces a website with a clumsy “portal” bolted onto a plugin, or an expensive application with a neglected public face. I kept them separate, with each built for its own job.

The marketing website

The public site is a custom build in Astro, a modern framework that produces fast, static pages. It includes:

• Service pages for the kinds of moves Wildfire specializes in
• About, team, and careers pages that show real people behind the company
• FAQs and guides that answer common questions before customers have to call
• A clear quote request path and click-to-call on every page

Because the pages are static, there is no database or plugin stack to attack or patch on the public site, and pages load quickly even on a phone.

Lighthouse scores

I ran Google Lighthouse against the live homepage in October 2026:

	Performance	Accessibility	Best practices	SEO
Mobile	96	96	100	100
Desktop	98	96	100	100

The mobile test simulates a mid-range phone on a slow connection, which is the hardest test and the one that matters most for real visitors. On the same mobile run, the main content rendered in about 2.5 seconds, with zero layout shift and zero total blocking time.

The private operations portal

Behind the public site sits a private, login-only portal built specifically around how Wildfire works. Their team uses it to move each order through its workflow in one place and see at a glance what needs attention next.

I’m keeping the details at a high level since it’s an internal tool, but the principle is the one I bring to every portal project: model the software on the business’s real process, rather than forcing the business into a generic tool’s idea of how it should work. This is the same kind of line-of-business software I’ve built for years on enterprise contracts in insurance, healthcare, automotive, and finance, just sized for a growing company.

What this means for a local business

Most Citrus County businesses need only the first half of this: a fast, trustworthy website that makes it easy to call. That’s what my website packages are for.

But if your team is running orders, jobs, or appointments through a tangle of spreadsheets, email, and sticky notes, the second half may matter more than you think. Read when a business needs a custom portal, see the Work page for screenshots, or visit engineering & portals to see how I approach custom software.