The repair shop family jumped for joy, overwhelmed after having its website named one of the best in the country, said Motor Works owner Marty Fay.

Motor Works, 316 E. Taylor St., won one of the Top 10 Automotive Repair Websites awards and was featured in AutoInc Magazine. Fay said his employees loved the feeling of placing in the top 10.

“It gives them a special home that makes them unique and proud,” Fay said. “They appreciate it greatly.”

Fay said he is one half of the website’s success. He wrote all of the stories and bios as well as took all of the photos for the site.

“That’s a huge amount of work,” Fay said. “So I’m very proud and very gratified personally. I’m very grateful that other people appreciate it.”

The other half of the website came from Imp Designs, a web designing company in Raleigh, N.C. Fay said Imp Designs came up with the idea of giving the website its retro look.

“Fay described his business as a hometown shop, where everyone knew each other,” said Chris Basnight, owner of Imp Designs. “We have a lot of experience with websites and part of the challenge is making clients understand the site is not for them, it’s for their customers.”

One of the Motor Works website’s features is the “sidebar bio,” which give customers some information about who works on their cars. Basnight said incorporating this feature would reinforce the idea that Motor Works is a hometown shop.

However, Basnight said his favorite feature to work on was the “Classic Cars” section. This is also a feature Fay said he worked hard on.

“I spent weeks and weeks on the stories for Classic Cars,” Fay said. “We’ve been doing that since we opened in 1984. What you see on the website is 10 or 20 percent. We have repaired hundreds.”

Classic Cars primarily services two types of cars: bread-and-butter and high-line cars. Motor Works’s bread-and-butter cars include Dodge Caravans, Ford Pick Ups and Honda Accords. Fay said these are the more average cars Motor Works receives and repairs.

“It is a niche that we very much enjoy,” Fay said. “People trust us with very expensive cars. When you look at some of them on the website, you couldn’t even replace it if it got burned up or destroyed. They’re irreplaceable.”

Motor Works’s second niche, the high-line cars, include BMWs, Mercedes, Jaguars and Lexuses.

“We are known as the shop to bring those sorts of cars to within a 40-mile radius of our location,” Fay said. “You’d have to go to Rockford or Aurora to begin to find somebody to work on those cars.”

Fay, along with the rest of the Motor Works, were excited about not only winning this award, but also the Technician of the Year award for head technician Mark Huff.

“It’s kind of one of those ‘can’t really believe it moments,'” Huff said. “I really can’t believe that all happened all at once. I’m not really sure how to put it into words about how amazing for me to get Tech of the Year and the shop to win Top 10 Auto websites. It’s amazing.”