Recently I discussed improving the photos on your website, but the best pictures in the world are worthless if the rest of the site is a turn-off. There is one golden rule in our business – keep it simple!
One of my pet hates is when I come to a website from a search engine such as Google to be greeted by a button stating “Click here to enter my site”. Why? I’ve already chosen to enter your site via the search engine, why do I now have to do it again?
No introductory flash movies, no buttons, all you need is an easy-to-navigate home page where your potential customer can find what they want, quickly. The web industry knows that if a site takes more than seven seconds to fulfil the customer’s needs, that customer will go elsewhere – you don’t have long…
Your homepage is your shop window just like on the High Street, where the only obvious businesses that don’t make much effort with their windows are sex shops and funeral parlours. Everyone else carefully dresses their window to catch the customer – you must do the same online.
On one site recently, a large used-car business, I couldn’t find my way to the used car section – trying to get there was a huge turn-off. If you sell used cars, ensure that your site takes the user straight to those cars. And don’t – this is another pet hate – tart up your site with pictures of Porsche 911s, Audi R8s and Aston Martins, unless that is what you sell.
Take a look at another site I recently found. www.burnettcars.co.uk is clearly not a large outlet with only around 20 cars to sell. But on this good-looking site one click takes you to the showroom where every car on sale is displayed with a good selection of pictures and a neat video.
Compare this with www.stratstone.com, from one of the biggest dealer groups in the UK, and incidentally one of the better websites around – but it actually takes three times as long to get to the used car selection as it does on Burnett Cars.
The internet is a great leveller – online, little Burnett Cars has an equal, maybe better, opportunity to sell its stock as does the might of Stratstone. And you could too – if you Keep It Simple…
(This copy is taken from James Tew's monthly column 'Net Gains' in the publication 'Car Dealer Magazine'. More information is available at www.cardealermagazine.co.uk )
Print | posted on Wednesday, April 15, 2009 4:20 PM