RealK

The brief

A network of petrol stations that alongside fuel runs a café, a car wash and a loyalty programme. They needed a site that would not be just a list of stations.

The problem was that three completely different groups of people come to a station and each one is looking for something else. If the site tries to address them all at once in a single voice, it reaches none of them.

What was solved

• Three entry paths depending on who arrived — driver, company customer, café visitor
• A network of stations with the opening hours and facilities of each one
• A separate branch for company customers and the Tank Plus card
• Promotions and the loyalty programme set up so they do not drown out the main navigation
• The whole visual design from scratch and the implementation in WordPress
• Content management so the client changes promotions and opening hours himself

Why a petrol station site cannot be one list

People come to a petrol station for completely different reasons, and each of them is looking for different information within ten seconds. A driver needs the opening hours and whether the station is on the way. A company customer is dealing with a fuel card and invoicing. Someone who stopped for coffee wants to know what is on the menu and whether there is somewhere to sit.

If the site tried to address everyone at once in a single voice, it would reach none of them. So we started with the information architecture, not the visuals.

How we split the content by three visitors

Instead of the usual “About us / Services / Contact” navigation, we built three entry paths that lead from the home page straight to what that person is dealing with.

• The driver — the network of stations with opening hours, available fuels and the facilities at each one. A station is a page of its own, not a row in a table, so it can be sent as a link and found in search.
• The company customer — a separate branch for the Tank Plus card with the terms and a contact for the sales rep. This group does not need to see coffee promotions.
• The café visitor — Fajn Shop Café as a topic of its own with its own menu, not a paragraph inside the text about fuel.

We deliberately kept the loyalty programme and the promotions out of the main navigation. They are seasonal things that would drown out the permanent content after a few months. They have a place of their own that campaigns can link to.

What was technically interesting about it

Managing the network of stations took the most work. Every station has different opening hours, different facilities and a different offer, and the client needs to change them himself — often and quickly, for example when holiday hours change.

It is built on a custom content type in WordPress with fields for hours, fuels and facilities. Staff fill in a form, not a page. Because of that every station looks the same even when five different people enter them, and nobody can break the layout by accident.

The site runs on WordPress with Elementor and custom CSS. Elementor is a deliberate choice here — the client can work with it and does not need us for every text change. Where Elementor would add unnecessary weight, we wrote the templates by hand.

What another company with several locations can take from this

If you have several branches, the most common mistake is to put them on one page as a list. Every station should have its own URL for three reasons: it can be sent to a customer, it can be found in search for a query like “petrol station + town”, and structured data about opening hours can be attached to it, which Google shows directly in the results.

The second thing: if your company sells several unrelated things, do not try to unify them into one sentence. Split it by who is coming, not by how your departments are arranged.

We build the other sites the same way — see how custom website development works.

How it turned out

The site is live and the client runs it himself — promotions, opening hours and the content of individual stations are changed without touching the code and without having to call a developer.