August 2010
3 posts
1 tag
Live Chat: Yeah!
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
3 tags
Domain Registry of America: Don't Fall for this...
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...
Sneak Peak: New Used Car Listing Sites
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:
Used BMWs for Sale - Is an online resource dedicated to all things BMW, all models, cars, trucks, suvs, and even some motorcycles
Earth Cars for Sale -...
July 2010
3 posts
2 tags
Search Engine Optimization
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...
5 tags
Passwords: Don't write them on sticky-notes!
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...
6 tags
Putting "SEO Experts" out of business, one car...
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...
June 2010
14 posts
8 tags
Great Read: Rework
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...
4 tags
Autotrader vs Cars.com
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 ...
5 tags
Customer Bill of Rights
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...
3 tags
Vehicle Photo Tips for Car Dealers
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
Find a nice clean spot where you move the vehicle to be photographed. Make sure it is free of clutter, trash, cars being repaired or washed, or other types of distractions. You should...
8 tags
Advice for a Newbie to SEO: Used Car Dealership...
This is a post I made on DealerRefresh forums (http://forum.dealerrefresh.com/f43/advice-newbie-search-engine-optimization-931.html)
Taking a look over the website, I do have some critical thoughts that I would like to make, some of which have already been pointed out by others (credit due to the first posters), and others will be new. I hope you take this as constructive criticism and use it...
Carfax's new Price Calculator....Will they lose...
As many of you car dealers know, Carfax has introduced a new section to their Carfax reports called ‘Price Calculator’ and placing phrases such as …
“This vehicle is worth $310 less than the retail book value based on the information reported to CARFAX.”
… on the vehicle reports visible to your customers.
Here is a sample report that shows...
5 tags
Stealing Customer's Domain Names is Wrong...
I have come to a very disturbing realization that many of the individuals in my industry are just plain crooks. They hold the domain names of their “customers” hostage in an effort to extort additional monies out of them. The thought of stealing a customer’s domain name or holding it hostage is so alien to the way I choose to do business, I am surprised to find that for others...
1 tag
Deciding Where to File →
“Often a plaintiff’s lawyer has a choice about where to file his or her client’s lawsuit. Those choices can involve whether to file the suit in state court in an urban or rural county or whether to file the action in a federal court rather than in a state court …”
4 tags
Using frames for vehicle inventory is a no no!
I hate to be the bearer of bad news but I went to your website and you have already shot yourself in the foot in so far as the Google rank of your inventory pages are concerned. You are making a HUGE mistake by depending on a company that frames your inventory content instead of having it hosted under your own domain name. Doing a Google search for all pages under your domain, Google sees no cars...
1 tag
AutoCorner System
The Auto Corner System is a powerful dealership inventory and website management system designed for new and used car dealerships, by a seasoned automotive professional, not some web-geek who thinks he knows the business.
Using the Auto Corner System you will be able to:
Instantly post your vehicles to Autotrader and Cars.com
Automatically import vehicle...
2 tags
Beyond the legalities: Concepts for Successful...
Beyond the legalities and beyond the immediate profit, you need to also look at the long term balance sheet. What is the cost of customer acquisition per vehicle sold in your place of business? In most dealerships this can easily be in the $500 - $1000 range. Make your customers happy and they will not only be a great prospect in the future, but they will also tell their friends and family about...
5 tags
Several reasons not to use Flash
1) Google cannot read flash words UNLESS whoever programmed the flash portion of your website has taken the time to have those words coded in such a way that they are discoverable by a search engine. Unfortunately, most flash that is produced for websites out there are not coded in this way because they were created by “click and shoot” flash development tools. You have to be able to...
2 tags
Editing Your Hosts File Can Kill Web Bugs and...
Look in your windows directory on your PC for a file called “HOSTS” (not “HOSTS.bak” or “HOSTS.SAM”, just plain “HOSTS” w/o any extension on it). Open this file in notepad so you can edit it. Please be aware that some versions of Windows keep the HOSTS file buried somewhere deep under the system or system32 directory so you might have to perform a...
4 tags
Tables vs CSS - I'm Tired of the Whole Argument!
First of all, there is nothing in the future that says tables will become obsolete. Tables will always be there for creating tabular data for the simple reason that they are a whole lot more efficient at that task then CSS. Plain and simple.
In response to the debate that IE screws things up and Mozilla is God and statements like that, too many webmasters miss the point of their jobs. The...