Motor Carrier HQ

Motor Carrier is a company that helps truckers get licensed and handle a bunch of other related paperwork that I totally don’t understand. We built a few websites for the owners, starting with Progressive Reporting (the company name before officially converting everything to Motor Carrier), then Motor Carrier HQ, then a podcast called Haulin’ Assets. The podcast is, apparently, super popular, which I think is really cool. I got a little glimpse into the world of truckers by working on these properties.

Originally I built the Motor Carrier HQ site in 2017. It was a custom design but without much in the way of custom, complicated features. I then built Progressive Reporting that same year, but with a different theme. A few years later, the client decided that they wanted to combine brands, and they preferred the Progressive theme. So we converted Motor Carrier to that theme in 2019. As far as I can tell, the current sites are still roughly the same theme that I built several years ago. These sites also included WooCommerce, because there are stores on the site to help you pay for the various services they offer.

In 2020, the client wanted to start a podcast, so one of my devs built a landing page site for the upcoming podcast, Haulin’ Assets. It basically got back-doored into a full website, because as I’ve mentioned on other projects, the way I build sites means that building one page effectively means you can build unlimited pages. It’s fine, though, because this client was great and with the company a really long time, so it was worth it. Once the pandemic hit, they actually continued to perform well (from what I remember) as trucking became more valuable than ever.

I will admit that I kinda hate the current design of Motor Carrier HQ because of the main menu. The logo being in the center like that inherently causes problems with flexibility and reactiveness, in terms of site content. When building something like this, either the menu becomes difficult to edit, or you can’t change it without making stylesheet changes (which clients never do). Most of my opinion of design comes down to how I foresee the client, or my coworkers, breaking the site in the future. Probably not the best judge of design, but that’s why I’m a developer, not a designer.