Cadillac V-Club
Case study · Membership organizations · Wild Apricot
Cadillac V-Club is the only GM-licensed club for Cadillac V-Series owners, run by volunteers across North America. Its website looked like a stock template. Less than six weeks after saying go, it looked like the brand it represents, on the same Wild Apricot account the club has used for years.
Before and after
Same platform, same account, same members. The change is the layer on top.
“I could not have delivered this project without you! You have been an amazing partner!”
The brief
The club has more than 1,200 members and 22 local chapters, no paid staff, and had been on Wild Apricot since 2013. Its chairman found us in the Wild Apricot Partners directory in September with a clear ask: a premium look, mobile first, able to win over a visitor in under a minute, on a fixed price, without leaving the platform.
He also attached three concept images the club had made with ChatGPT.
Moving to another platform was never the answer. Wild Apricot runs the club's memberships, renewals, events, registrations and payments, and its volunteers know how to use it. What needed to change was everything a visitor sees.
The goal was a site that doesn't look like Wild Apricot, and still works like it.
From AI mood board to a real site
AI concepts are good at mood and bad at facts. We treated them as a statement of taste: faithful to the direction, with room to correct it. Within a day of the go-ahead, the club had two clickable directions to compare, built as real pages from their real brand files, events and prices.
“We are both very pleased with your services and creativity. We are definitely headed in the right direction.”
What we kept
The dark, premium mood, the "Tour. Track. Dominate." headline, the "Paddock" language and the card layouts. Three things changed.
The logoA garbled AI lettering became the club's actual mark, with the official Cadillac Gothic typeface.
The colorAn invented bronze gave way to Cadillac red, sampled from the club's own artwork. The club chose it from a live switch.
The contentInvented benefits and copy became the club's real events, articles, prices and membership terms.
What it takes inside Wild Apricot
Many Wild Apricot restyles stop at the CSS box. This one is a custom layer on top of the stock theme: theme overrides for the layouts, plus styling for Wild Apricot's own gadgets. We stayed on the theme the club already ran, so going live didn't mean switching themes on a working site.
Login, calendars, registration, directories, forms and blog pages were styled from the platform's real markup, so nothing drops back to the old look a click later.
Volunteers pick a heading or paragraph in the normal editor and it comes out right. Old pasted formatting is overridden.
The story cards fill themselves from a short list of links. Change a link, and the headline, label and photo follow. The club's Communications Director can do it without us.
Each button on the membership page opens the application with that level already chosen, and skips straight to the email step.
A signed-in member's link to the Cadillac Collection carries their own member ID. Visitors get a clean link.
On a phone, the five membership levels sit in a stack like playing cards, with each level's name and price showing. A choice has to look like part of the set.
The numbers
We measured the old site in October and the new one on launch night, with the same tool, at desktop and phone widths, logged out. These are single captures, so treat the speed figures as a guide. The accessibility counts come from axe, an automated WCAG 2.1 AA checker. Automated checks don't prove a site is accessible, but they do catch a lot.
| What we measured | Desktop | Phone |
|---|---|---|
| Page weightHome page, everything a visitor downloads | Desktop6.9MBfrom 15.6 MB | Phone5.2MBfrom 13.3 MB |
| RequestsHome page, files the browser has to fetch | Desktop92from 190 | Phone74from 190 |
| Load timeHome page, even with more images on it | Desktop2.0sfrom 3.2 s | Phone2.3sfrom 3.0 s |
| Accessibility flags15 matched pages, elements axe flagged | Desktop29from 998 | Phone30from 974 |
Our custom accessibility tool. On launch night the home page scored 92 on our free popseo.com accessibility checker. Its one warning covers 19 images marked as decorative, including repeated dealer crests and video posters, which a person still has to confirm. We run this check on every new site, so you don't have to worry about whether a site we create or modify for you passes these important metrics.
Run the check on cadillacvclub.com to see today's score.
Dead links. The old home page linked to a racing page that returned a 404. Public pages and their links were crawled and checked on launch day.
How could we do it better?
Every time we take on a project, we look for ways to improve. How could it have gone a little smoother, or a little faster?
This one went well. The new site was built and reviewed on a separate trial copy, including by the club's chapter directors, then rebuilt on the live account in a single working day on November 6, while the club's volunteers moved their own content alongside us. Even so, our post mortem turned up three areas to tighten.
Confirm all files arrived. Comparing file sizes missed 40 empty image files. We caught and replaced them, and now compare the actual bytes served.
Improving team coordination. Wild Apricot doesn't stop two admins saving at once, and a theme rebuild of ours coincided with a template error. We restored the template from Wild Apricot's change history. We now name who owns each page and when, and announce rebuilds first.
The final sweep. Our automated sweep passed three event pages with an unreadable line, and someone looking at the screenshots caught it. The sweep now runs on the live site before the switch, and looking at the screenshots is part of the sign-off.
All three are now written into the run sheet we use for every Wild Apricot launch.
How long did the project take? Six weeks
The chairman writes in through the Wild Apricot Partners directory, with three AI concept images.
"Let's move forward!" Fixed-price project starts the same day.
Access, brand kit and two clickable concept directions, all in one day.
Second round approved. Blackwing style, dark, Cadillac red.
The theme is running on the trial copy of the site.
Membership, chapters, sponsors, dealers and leadership pages, with a full-site check after each round. Chapter directors and club leadership review it.
Cutover to the live account. The site goes public that evening.
“It has been a challenging but fun project and your support has exceeded my expectations.”
“The general feedback from the 22 Chapter Directors was very positive.”
We don't just build car club websites
We work on anything that runs on Wild Apricot: associations, chapter networks, nonprofits and clubs of every kind. If Wild Apricot runs your members and your website doesn't do you justice, the same approach applies.
- Keep the platform, change the layer. Your members, renewals and payments don't have to move for your site to look completely different. See our Wild Apricot consulting.
- Bring your AI concepts. They're a fast way to show taste. Just expect the logo, the facts and the fine print to need a human.
- Style the whole platform. A beautiful home page that drops into a default login or calendar screen one click later isn't finished.
- Build for your volunteers. If updating the home page takes a developer, it won't get updated. Make the right result the easy one.
- Test by using it. Tap every menu on a real phone, click every Join button and log in as an ordinary member. Automated checks catch a lot, but not everything.
