As some of you might have noticed we now have Live Chat enabled for both Pre-Sale Questions and Technical Support Questions (from the Management Menu). Hope this helps you guys out. Let us know what you think.
Steven
Over the past few days I have been receiving telephone calls from my customers worried about loosing their domain name. Each customer asks, “But I thought you handled this for me?” The reason for the panic is Domain Registry of America, a company that uses a tactic of sending what appears to be a bill to business owners in an effort to sign the customer up to their domain registration service.
The problem with their tactic, is the letters they send look like a bill with a headline of “Domain Name Expiration Notice” and “You must renew your domain name to retain exclusive rights to it on the Web”. The wording is purposely designed to confuse non-technically minded individuals into inadvertently transferring their domain to Domain Registry of America.
Just wanted to drop a quick post on here to give everyone a sneak peak of some new used car vehicle inventory listing sites I have been putting together. The designs of each site are not finalized, but you can see where we are going with them:
Over the coming months I will be adding more sites and prettying up the designs. The sites are free resources for all to use.
Our SEO is a fairly straight forward approach in that we focus on a number of things to get your site visible to the largest audience based on tried and true techniques. First, taking into account the various metrics that Google publicly acknowledges, our page designs are kept simple and light weight in terms of external dependencies such as flash files, heavy graphics, and javascript. This approach means that the load time of our sites pages is extremely fast when compared to the competition. Most people are unaware of this but load time is a metric that Google pays attention to. We also stick with standard convention when it comes to header/menu/content/footer layouts and stay away from anything risky here. This covers two bases: first your customers won’t be confused when it comes to surfing your pages and second, Google does look at how the navigation works in the site and grades this as well. We also do not use flash at all. First of all, Google and other search engines cannot read text that is embedded in flash based graphics and animation and second, too many users out there use their iPhones (and now iPads) to surf the web and flash content simply is not available to them. Again, keeping it simple here reaches a larger potential audience.
This morning, I was at the office of one of my customers, and I saw her writing down the password to her bank account on a sheet of paper located under her keyboard. Now, I really hate to call a customer out on this one (especially when I know she will be reading this), but I hope this blog post can help out my dealers to store their passwords in a safer place.
As we all know we should have hard-to-guess passwords for all of our online accounts, everything from our Facebook login, to our Bank of America accounts. The problem is keeping track of these passwords can be a real pain in the butt.
I say this because we receive numerous inquiries a week from self proclaimed ‘SEO Experts’ asking about the ‘hooks’ into our system (don’t worry if you don’t know what hooks are, it doesn’t matter much). They are shocked when we tell them for we have no ‘hooks’ for them to play with and, for security reasons, no one except the AutoCorner staff has access to the data files on the server. They usually continue on with how they want to ‘optimize’ our customer’s keywords for ‘optimal placement in SERPs, blah, blah, blah. For the uninitiated, SERPs (Search Engine Result Page) is a fancy way of saying how your site ranks when a web visitor searches.
Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson
Just finished this book and I wanted to post a quick something saying how much I loved it. The honesty in how Jason and David present the information is eyeopening. These are the guys that developed Ruby on Rails among a number of other products and are pretty damn successful at what they do.
“…a Webby manifesto for post-recession success.“—Newsweek
“If given a choice between investing in someone who has read REWORK or has an MBA, I’m investing in REWORK every time. This is a must read for every entrepreneur.”
—Mark Cuban, co-founder of HDNet and Broadcast.com and owner of the Dallas Mavericks
Reply to post on http://www.autodealerpeople.com/group/internetretailing/forum/topics/autotrader-vs-carscom
——
No offense to the poster of this link but that page at buy-new-car-used-car.com dates from March 2005. The info presented in it is seriously out of date and really doesn’t provide an accurate comparison of the two companies. Since 2005 a lot has changed with both companies in terms of what they offer and how their relative performances might differ.
Above all else, AutoCorner is dedicated to bringing humanity and civility back to the Automotive DMS/CRM industry. We have seen time and time again where customers have been taken to slaughter by their website providers and this is something we just cannot sit back idly and watch. The rights of those in the new and used car industry need to be protected and that’s why we created our Customer Bill of Rights. While our intentions are to make a profit, we feel that having a lasting relationship with our customers is a much more profitable way to do business.
It is recommended that you take reasonable care with how and where you take the photos of the vehicles that you post to your website. The following are some points to follow when taking these photos.
Good Photo Tips
