Design directions · Go-kart plans website · v1
Five genuinely different directions — not five colour schemes of the same layout. Each one makes a different bet about what convinces someone to trust a set of plans enough to pay for them. Pick one and everything after this gets easier.
How to read these. Each panel below is the real page, embedded and shrunk to 80% — not a drawing of one. What you're looking at is what gets built. No invented prices and no made-up specifications: anything Isaac hasn't told us yet reads TBC, and the words are placeholders.
Every one opens as a page you can click around. Three pages per direction — home, a plan page, and the enquiry form — so you can judge how it behaves, not just how it looks. Use the link under each panel.
About the photographs. They are borrowed public-domain images, listed on the sources page. None of them are Isaac's karts and not one of them ships — they're there so the layouts can be judged with real pictures in them instead of grey boxes.
Two numbers matter on every option: how many photos it needs, and how many words. Your client is unlikely to supply many of either, so an option that needs a lot of both is a bad bet no matter how good it looks.
Direction 01 — photo-led
Dark, heavy, and built around big photographs of real karts and real fabrication. The kind of site a racing team or a fabrication shop would have. Trust comes from the pictures — you look at the welds and you believe the person.
It's the most immediately convincing option if the photographs are good. Dark backgrounds make photos look better than light ones do, and it needs very little writing — a headline and a caption per kart carries a whole page.
Totally dependent on the photos. With four phone snaps it looks like a site that lost its images. Dark sites are also less forgiving of mixed-quality photography — every difference in lighting shows.
Direction 02 — drawing-led
The technical drawing becomes the design. Measured line work, dimension arrows, and a title block borrowed from real engineering drawings. It says "this is properly drafted" before a single word is read — which is exactly the doubt a buyer has.
It survives having almost no photographs, and it's the most distinctive of the five — practically nobody in this market does it. It also shows the buyer the actual product: they're buying drawings, so drawings should be the hero.
We need permission to show real drawing extracts — enough to prove quality, not enough to build from. And a badly-drafted original would be exposed rather than hidden by this treatment.
Direction 03 — data-led
Built like a parts catalogue: every plan as a row, every fact in a column, comparison built into the page. Made for the buyer who already knows what they want and is checking whether it fits their garage, budget and skill.
This is the option that fits your client's temperament best. It needs no paragraphs at all — just numbers he already knows off the top of his head. Buyers comparing plans get what they actually want, and it scales cleanly if he adds more designs later.
It informs but doesn't excite. Someone who doesn't yet know they want a go-kart won't be persuaded by a table. Weakest of the five on your "adventurous" and "visually exciting" goals.
Direction 04 — story-led
Structured like a build diary — photo, caption, photo, caption, following a kart from bare tube to finished machine. Sells the experience of building one, not the document. The most human of the five.
Best of the five for search traffic — genuinely useful build content is exactly what Google rewards, and it answers the questions people actually type. It's also the most persuasive to someone on the fence.
It needs the one thing you've told me isn't available. A build log is a writing commitment that never ends, plus photographs taken during builds that have already happened. I'm including it for completeness, but on what you've said, this is the wrong bet today.
Direction 05 — typographic
Type does the shouting. Enormous condensed headlines, hard rules, black on off-white, one photograph doing a lot of work. Borrowed from motorsport posters and race programmes rather than from other websites.
Needs almost nothing from the client and still looks deliberate. Big type is cheap to produce and expensive-looking. Handles a thin catalogue well — three plans don't look sparse, they look curated.
Style outruns substance. It promises excitement and then has to deliver detail, and a buyer spending real money wants specifications, not attitude. Also the least forgiving of clumsy execution — big type makes every spacing error obvious.
The two columns that should decide this are the two middle ones.
| Direction | Photos | Writing | Best at | Fails when |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 Workshop | 20+ good | Low | Instant credibility | Photos are thin or mixed |
| 02 Blueprint | 3–5 | Low | Proving the plans are properly drafted | We can't show drawing extracts |
| 03 Spec Sheet | 1 per plan | Very low | Comparing plans, zero copy | Visitors need persuading first |
| 04 Build Log | 40+ in sequence | High, ongoing | Search traffic | Nobody keeps writing it |
| 05 Garage Poster | 5–8 strong | Very low | Looking modern on thin content | Buyer wants detail, not attitude |
Recommendation
02 Blueprint for the structure, with 01 Workshop's photography sitting inside it. Drawings carry the pages where photos don't exist; photographs take over on the pages where they do. It degrades gracefully — which none of the pure directions do.
The reasoning is boring and practical. You don't yet know how many photos exist, and the decision has to survive both answers. If it turns out there are forty great photographs, we lean the design toward 01 and it looks superb. If there are four, the drawings carry it and nobody can tell anything was missing. Committing hard to 01 today is a bet on information you don't have.
Blueprint is also the honest one. He sells drawings. Showing drawings isn't a metaphor — it's the product, and it answers the buyer's real question, which is "is this a proper set of plans or someone's sketch?"
One note on the design library on your Desktop. I read it. It's a real one with opinions in it, but it was built for the rewards product, so some of it doesn't transfer. What does: the pull toward bold editorial type and generous space, and the dislike of plain, undecorated civic-style pages. What doesn't: the rule that dark backgrounds are too cold. That was right for a loyalty app aimed at corner shops. For a workshop selling go-kart plans, dark and mechanical is exactly right — so Direction 01 shouldn't be ruled out on those grounds.