The old CBLP homepage looked fine and told you nothing. The new one is built around the questions people actually ask us before they order.
The old homepage did what most car parts homepages do. A big photo, a row of products, a button that said Shop Now, and that was about it. It looked tidy enough. It just did not answer a single question anybody actually had.
We know what those questions are, because the same ones land in our inbox every week. Will this fit my car? Are those lights legal? Who are you? What happens when it goes wrong?
So we rebuilt the front page around those four things instead of around a banner.
Chassis first, because that is how the cars were built
The first proper section on the new page is not a product. It is eight chassis codes with the years underneath them: F80, F82, F87, F22 and F23, F32 and F36, F30 and F31, F20 and F21, E82.
That is deliberate. BMW did not build a "2016 3 Series", it built an F30, and the difference between two cars sold in the same year can be the difference between a part bolting on and a part going back in the box. Every part on this site is listed against a chassis code rather than a model year, so the homepage may as well start there too. Pick your car, see what fits it, ignore everything else.
Twelve chassis codes covered at the last count. It will be more by the end of the year.
We stopped describing the headlights and started showing them
The Ikon headlights are the reason most people find us, and describing a colour-switching daytime running light in a paragraph of text has never really worked. So the new homepage has a switcher. Tap white, yellow, amber or red and you see a real photograph of that colour on a real car, not a render and not a supplier catalogue shot.
Alongside it sits the spec, in plain terms. Bi-LED projector. No coding. Colour changed from the high-beam lever, five flashes for white, six for yellow, seven for amber or red. Silver as standard or Shadowline black inside. E-marked. Sold as a matched pair. Twelve months against defects.
And directly under all of it, in writing: white and yellow are road legal in the UK, amber and red are for off-road and show use. That line costs us a few sales from people who wanted red DRLs on the road. We would rather lose those than have somebody fail an MOT holding a receipt from us.
The awkward answers are on the front page now
There is a full FAQ at the bottom of the homepage, and we deliberately put the uncomfortable bits in it rather than burying them in a policy page.
How to identify your headlight version from the pin count in the connector, and why the year on your V5 will not tell you. What the £175 swap fee is if you order the wrong version. That adaptive cornering is not reproduced, so a car that had it will lose it. That we cannot take returns on splitters and diffusers that turn out not to fit, which is exactly why we would rather check a registration number for you first. What happens with duties if you are ordering from outside the UK.
None of that is flattering. All of it is the sort of thing you find out after you have paid, on most sites. Putting it on the homepage means the people who order from us know what they are getting, and that is a much better start than a happy checkout followed by a difficult email.
We put our names on it
There is a section that says who we are, because two friends running a unit in Hertfordshire is not something to hide behind a stock photo.
We started CBLP because we spent years talking about builds, fitment and parts that cost twice what they should. The range is BMW because those are the cars we own and drive. Every part on the site is one we would run ourselves, chosen for how it looks in daylight rather than how it looks in a render. We hold the stock here, we pack it here, and when you email about fitment you are talking to whichever one of us chose the part.
That is the whole reason to buy from a UK specialist instead of an overseas listing, so it belongs on the front page rather than buried in an About Us nobody clicks.
What we are not claiming
This is a homepage, not a personality transplant. Delivery on the bigger items still takes about a week. We still only cover a handful of chassis. The range is deliberately narrow: lighting, carbon and the exterior parts that change how a car sits. Nothing that needs a dyno, nothing that needs a remap.
What has changed is that you should now be able to work out whether we have anything for your car, and whether it will fit it, in about thirty seconds. That was the entire brief.
If something on the new page is confusing, broken, or missing the answer you came for, tell us. Email info@cblpstyling.com and it will get looked at properly.
Have a look at the new homepage