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Yes…your baby is ugly

Well I know I have been gone awhile, getting MicrositesByU up and running and at the same time redesigning my blog and designing and getting the MicrositesByU blog up and running, the design is done we are coding it now so stay tuned for that.

The other day I ran across a blog post by my friend Chris Brogan “Dear Car Dealerships – Stop Sucking” as you might imagine this started a small firestorm in my little circle. During the debate on Chris’s blog we discussed a wide range of topics, but I think we all agreed the current state of website capability for car dealers is… in a word horrible.

Now before you go out to slap your website vendor silly understand this is in large part your fault, yes that’s right Mr. Dealer you are to blame as much and if you ask me maybe more than your provider. When did it become acceptable to hand over the keys to our business to a website provider who makes some claim they can’t back up then bitch when we aren’t selling more cars? Some of you have heard me say this before but for those that have not here it is again…

“The web is not a department; it’s not a sideline where you pick up extra units. IT IS YOUR BUSINESS!”

 The web is your showroom it is the first contact for 90% of the people who buy and service with you. Why in the hell would you leave this to a vendor who shows up and says “Hi I can get you more leads with a better site”?

Ok now let’s fix it.

1.  It is not your website provider’s job to give you a working site. It’s their job to give you a functional site, it’s your job to make it work.�
2.  The website in NOT for you, it’s for your customer, go find out what they want not how cool it looks to you.
3.  Get your mind in a constant state of improvement with your online capability to get your visitors what they want, when they want it, the way they want it.
4.  People come to your site for 2 main reasons – 1. Find and buy a car 2. Schedule a service appointment 

With this in mind this I am going to share with you an express evaluation I did for the Jim McNatt Autogroup. I am sharing this with TJ Houghton’s, (Corporate Director) permission. I hope that it might help others who are looking at a site redesign get some good basic usability structure in place while doing so.

McNatt is taking is choosing to take control of their web presence by building their own site in WordPress. This has some great advantages and some drawbacks.

Advantage – you have control over every page. This will allow you to optimize for online conversion and truly start down the path of toward ecommerce.

Drawback – you have total control meaning that you will need to have some people dedicated to keeping up with site. Uptime, code fixes, update, content ECT all your responsibility. If you don’t have or are not prepared to commit the resources to doing this it’s a drawback. 

There are more but we won’t spend time on the platform that’s another post.

Now let’s look at the design, most every website vendor will have enough flexibility to get these suggestion implemented.
1st mcnattautogroup.com

1. Where is the call to action? What do you want me to do?
2. Never a good idea to have a dark background on a site it has a tendency to draw the eye off the page to the darker areas. Lighten this thing up.
3. The belt buckle logo is neat but way to big and is taking up very, very valuable real estate. I would scale it down a ¼ of this size and put it in the top left corner and bring the franchise logos next to it this will raise a lot of your important info above the fold
4. Where is your dealership and how do I contact you, these are 2 really big questions people will have lower in the funnel and I am not going to want to dig to find out, particularly as your name is driving over 90% of your traffic meaning they were looking for you in the first place.
5. If I want to schedule service where do I do that here? Its way down at the bottom where nobody goes. There is really only 2 reasons someone is here… buy a car or schedule service should easily find that above the fold

This is an eye tracking map of this page shows you where the eye is drawn. Biggest problem, the eye goes everywhere and most of it is away from the important stuff. This is that dark background that huge logo
Good news is that you search form is simple and is catching the eye soon. Secondly things that move will draw the eye so if you just have to have a animate images to the left of this search form put offers and calls to action in them not just a car.

2nd McNatt Toyota

1. Overload – you have a animated pic here, Toyota’s for sale here, Mc Deals here (what is that?), cars for sale and featured vehicles. 4 ways to get to a car I want to buy, none telling me how to start my shopping process I am supposed to just figure that out.
2. How do I search for a Toyota?
3. The background image is pulling the eye away from the important stuff
4. Logo / header way too big takes up too much valuable real estate
5. Got the phone numbers in but why don’t you want to track that conversion?
6. Again where do I schedule service? Ah yes little link way down where nobody goes

Here again most of the eye attention is drawn to areas of the site that are not important because the pic is moving and the logo is big on a red background and the image is really pulling the eye off the page.

I hope this has given you some good user centered design ideas that you can implement on you site to increase conversion.