Has been in business online for 0 years
The hardest part of my job is to break some of the traditional thinking that dealers want to bring online. The car industry is traditional by nature; new flavors of the same cars arrive annually, dealerships are branded with family names, and the jingle-based commercial is a dealership classic. I will never forget the jingle that Century 3 Chevrolet of Pittsburgh uses in their commercials. Ever. Really, it has been more than 5 years since I have lived within their reach.
Domain names
I like to suggest using a three word domain with “usedcars” in it instead of “familymotors” as the primary location for a website that sells used cars. Sometimes dealers include a city name in their business name, which is fantastic. ClassicMotorsOfSomewhere.com is a great start, but length becomes an issue. Now, I am aware that this website resides on a domain name that is not short or easy to spell, but this site was not designed to sell things.
Website and advertisement copy
Dealers insist on writing sentences, even when embedded in properly-cased paragraphs, in all capital letters. THIS IS A TECHNIQUE USED IN PRINT ADVERTISING TO GRAB ATTENTION. While browsing the web, writing in all capital letters is perceived as shouting and takes longer to read than lower or mixed case. The most effective print on the web has a personal touch that reads like a conversation would sound.
Presentation
I prefer not to wrap text around a picture of a wheel. I do not think that drawing an ugly “burst” around words will make a message more effective. Instead, I very much like to guide the reader’s attention from the top left corner downward. I see no reason to disorganize a page to the degree that a message needs to jump out at the reader in order to grab their attention. Websites are advertisements, but to design them like ads severely dilutes their effectiveness.
I am a big fan of playing fair. Arguably, I have been in the car business for 0 years. Here are some challenges that I have faced since I started building websites for the car business.
- Using very vibrant colors instead of a blended palette. Most of the layouts and logos I designed prior contained more colors to cover a range of tones. Most dealership logos and signwork are cheesy and very brightly colored. Adapting to this change has expanded my versatility greatly, and now my designs have less bland, washed-out colors in them.
- Privacy-sensitive input. No one wants to get a call once a week from a dealership asking if they found a car yet. Email inquiries between a dealer and a shopper are very different than emails between a shopper and a private seller. Car shoppers (and dealers shopping the competition) are very discrete when they fill out contact forms, and massaging this data on the way into a database is a challenge.
- Creating an animated neon sign in flash. The glowing look is fairly easy, but animating light is a severe challenge that I still face. The signature flicker of a neon sign is something I have not yet been able to digitize.
What challenges have you encountered? Are there any you still struggle with?
Traditional thinking is always difficult to overcome with dealers. When reading this post I found myself nodding my head in agreement. A big one for me is use of the term “used cars”. Dealers hate that term. They always want to use “preowned” instead, but looking at site statistics, customers search for “used” a lot more frequently. The dealers just don’t seem to think from the (present day) customer’s standpoint as much as they should.