Case Study: WhichCar

What

A high-traffic Australian automotive publishing platform. I worked across product features, publishing workflows, commercial tooling and a replacement platform build.

Why

To improve buyer-facing features, make editorial work easier, reduce media delivery costs, modernise publishing workflows and move a multi-brand publishing network toward a faster headless platform.

Who

How

Design

Designed feature concepts for review, comparison and news surfaces, adapting them across all five brands' very different colour schemes: WhichCar, Wheels, 4X4 Australia, Motor and Street Machine, while keeping buyer clarity, editorial flow and commercial placements balanced.

Development

Worked across Node.js, Sanity Studio, React, Vue.js and AWS as part of the live publishing stack.

Built custom React Gutenberg blocks to replace ad-hoc HTML with structured editorial composition.

Co-architected and built the replacement platform using Vue, Astro, Sanity Studio, headless WordPress, Meilisearch and AWS-backed Laravel APIs, with typed components, tests and CI, speeding up development turnaround by around 75%.

Hosting

Replaced Cloudinary with a serverless AWS/Laravel image pipeline — saving around USD $60k annually while simplifying image delivery and reducing recurring media costs.

Improved TTFB, TTFI and page weight across the rebuild.

Imagery + Icons

Improved media handling end-to-end so image quality, payload size and publishing speed stayed balanced on high-volume pages.

Integrations

Built Vue tooling for native-ad previews and code generation so non-developers could assemble and test commercial units without waiting on engineering support.

Connected content, search and platform services across Sanity Studio, headless WordPress, Meilisearch, Laravel APIs and Google Ad Manager.

With

• Astro
• AWS
• Cloudinary
• Custom CSS
• GitHub
• GAM
• JavaScript
• Laravel
• Meilisearch
• Node.js
• React
• Sanity CMS
• Tailwind
• TypeScript
• WordPress
• Vite
• Vue.js

Final design

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