AutoCorner Blog

Live Chat: Yeah!

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 12:12:38 -0400

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

Domain Registry of America: Don't Fall for this Scam

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 09:08:00 -0400

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.

If you receive one of these letters, please put it in your shredder as they are just a scam. Now that you have done this, you SHOULD VERIFY when your domain name expires. You can do this by verifying the expiration date with GoDaddy:

Enter your domain name above and click Go.
GoDaddy will come back and tell you that domain is taken (of course you own it), click on ‘Get info’.
A new page will load, scroll down to the bottom and look for “Expires on: “. This will tell you when it expires.

If you are an AutoCorner customer, we cover your domain registration each year, but it MUST be in our GoDaddy account. When you are reading the information on the GoDaddy page make sure it matches the following:

Registrant: stockNum Systems875 Pass Run Rd
Luray, Virginia 22835
United States

Registered through: GoDaddy.com, Inc. (http://www.godaddy.com)
Domain Name: AUTOCORNER.COM
Created on: 19-Jul-03
Expires on: 19-Jul-20
Last Updated on: 20-Aug-10

Administrative Contact:
Dewey, Albert
support@stocknum.com
stockNum Systems
875 Pass Run Rd
Luray, Virginia 22835
United States +1.5407433035

Technical Contact:
Dewey, Albert
support@stocknum.com
stockNum Systems
875 Pass Run Rd
Luray, Virginia 22835
United States+1.5407433035

Domain servers in listed order:
NS1.STOCKNUM.NET
NS2.STOCKNUM.NET

Registry Status: clientDeleteProhibited
Registry Status: clientRenewProhibited
Registry Status: clientTransferProhibited
Registry Status: clientUpdateProhibited

Sneak Peak: New Used Car Listing Sites

Sat, 14 Aug 2010 10:00:00 -0400

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 - Looking to save some green while helping the environment. Checkout these hybrids and other high MPH vehicles.
Used Car Listings in Winchester, VA - Great resource for those in the Winchester area!

Over the coming months I will be adding more sites and prettying up the designs. The sites are free resources for all to use.

Search Engine Optimization

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 19:16:34 -0400

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.

We also provide an excellent interface in our back end to allow you a great deal of control over the actual data and information that appears in each your vehicle listings. Not only this, but within our posting and editing tools, every drop-down list is completely customizable and has a learn-as-you-go feature so you are never stuck with data entry choices that compromise what it is you need to say. Beyond this, I will say that our site designs are not graphically intensive and they are not supposed to be. We don’t do custom sites and won’t claim to have the most amazing looking award winning sites on the planet. This said, our strength lies in the fact that our dealer’s customers, when visiting our dealer’s sites, all have the same thing to say about our approach - they love the uncluttered look and ease of navigation that our sites offer. We take the approach that our sites are not for the ego gratification of our dealers but instead are intended for their customers use instead. It is the car buying public that needs to be served by an effective website and the truth is that they really don’t give a hoot about how fancy a webmaster can render some animated flash content or fancy graphics. They are there to research their potential car purchase and anything that distracts from this experience we view as a negative and refrain from doing.

Hope this answers some of your questions,

Passwords: Don't write them on sticky-notes!

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 18:59:00 -0400

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.

So what do we all do? Well, we either choose the name of our dogs, kids, girlfriends, etc. as our passwords —or— we write them on notes next to our computer. Either option is bad.

So what *should* you do? Well you need to have have passwords like BL*n(y6ss8D$7tRQvMpeFhhEzW)nt[FhcCq>id=TF6E/6w+T}q — no that wasn’t the computer puking on itself that is an actual password (or at least it could be). I am sure you are wondering “how in the heck am I suppose to remember that?”. Well there are a number of options and solutions. Personally, for me, I use 1Password to keep track of my passwords. This is an inexpensive application that runs on your computer (Mac & Windows), your iPhone, or your Android and keeps track of all your passwords safely and securely.

Now, I am a Mac user (and you should be too), so I have been using the Mac version of 1Password for years. Thankfully, for you Windows users out there, the guys at Agile Web Solutions are developing a Windows version of 1Password, and it is in beta. I highly recommend you give it a shot, you will not be sorry.

There are even some advanced (don’t worry they are VERY simple) things you can do using 1Password’s integration with Dropbox to keep your passwords securely synced across multiple computers and even your your iPhone.

You can find more information about 1Password at Agile’s Website http://agile.ws/onepassword/overview — just choose Windows (or Mac, iPhone, etc.) for all the details.

Putting "SEO Experts" out of business, one car dealership at a time

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 09:01:00 -0400

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.

In reality, many of these “SEO Experts” are looking to prey on our customers, selling them the false hope that as long as the dealer continues to fork out money each week to these thieves, they can guarantee you top search engine placement. The fact is NO ONE can guarantee you top placement in Google, anyone saying they can is simply lying to you.

I am sure I must sound very cynical right now. Well, I am. I do not like seeing individuals that may not be the most technologically sophisticated being taken advantage of from snake oil salesmen. Now before I continue, I am sure there are a few honest SEO guys (or gals) out there, I just haven’t met you. For the rest, take this as a warning, stop stealing from my customers.

Still here? Okay, good, I feel much better now that is off my chest.

I took to writing this page as a way to explain many of the features built into AutoCorner that were designed for optimal search engine placement. Now, like I said above, no one can guarantee you top placement. What we can do is follow the information that Google, Bing, and Yahoo provide us and use this information to give you the best search engines results possible. This page will *not* cover everything we do to assist you in your placement as we do not wish for our competitors to get any creative ideas, I will, however, share a few of the things we do.

Even if you do not choose to become an AutoCorner Customer—not sure why you wouldn’t :)—I hope this information is useful for you. If you have any questions or comments, please comment on this post as I welcome your input.

<title> tags

This is the ‘title’ your web-browser shows at the top of the screen

Just so you are familiar with <title> tags, please look at the top of your computer screen, see the words “AutoCorner Blog: Putting “SEO Experts” out of business, one car dealership at a time” that is the <title> tag for this page. A <title> tag is just a piece of computer instructions in the web page’s HTML source code that tells the browser what the name of the page is.

There are actually multiple purposes of a <title> tag, and, at the moment, we are interested in how search engines use them. Most websites mistakenly put their company name as the first part of the <title> tag, but the problem with this strategy is your company name isn’t what the customer is searching for. In the case of this website, most people that come here via a search result were probably looking for ‘SEO optimization for their website’, not necessarily how AutoCorner does it better. That is why our <title> tag is not ‘AutoCorner: How we do SEO’. Making this a little more relevant to car dealers, take a look at the following two search engine results.

~ vs. ~

Notice how the company name is second to the actual item for sale in the <title> tag. This is not by accident, it is by design. But don’t just take my word for it, here is Matt Cutts from Google:

(images from Advice for a Newbie to SEO: Used Car Dealership website review)

Meta Description & Keyword Tags

Proper, page relevant, description and keywords are essential

This is really a continuing thought from the previous section, but I thought it deserved its own write-up. Looking again at the previous two images of search results (above), you will notice the pages from Ultimate Automotive Group (an AutoCorner customer) have a description beginning with your used vehicle’s year, make, model, then continuing into a well written description of the specific vehicle. This is because our system takes what you enter into the vehicle’s comments & description section and uses this for the page’s meta description tag.

Look closely again at those two images, you notice how the other site’s description is, “Used Cars Prospect Park PA,Kennett Square PA,Buy Here Pay Here Autos…] The reason for this is in how the webmaster made his meta description tag.

The Wrong Way:

<meta name="description" content="Used Cars Prospect Park PA,Kennett Square PA,Buy Here Pay Here Autos,Philadelphia,Used Cars Philly,Buy Here Pay Here Dealership Chester County PA,In House Auto Financing,Used Cars,Used Trucks, Used SUVs,Bad Credit Delco,Buy Here Pay Here Cars Delaware County PA,Buy Here Pay Here Car Loans,Auto Finance Delaware County,BHPH Car Lot Wilmington PA,Buy Here Pay Here Car Loans PA,Used Car Lots PA">

(First off please do not think I am picking on another dealer’s site. I was asked by them to give my opinion, so that is what I am doing. )

I do not expect you to understand that line of code, just pay attention to what is in-between quotes… a massive list of spammed keywords. This is not a description, it is spam. The webmaster also copied the same block of keywords and placed it on each and every page on their website, which gives each page the same useless description. You must think of your site from the perspective of your potential customer. Which link do you think they are going to click on?

You can compare this to the description tag for one of the pages on the Ultimate Automotive Group’s site.

The Right Way:

<meta name="description" content="2005 Mercedes Benz CLK 320 - This Mercedes Benz CLK 320 is waiting for you to take it home today. This is one of the cleanest, low mileage Mercedes Benzs we have had in a long time and it definitely won't last at this price. Whether hauling a heavy load or accelerating up to highway speeds, the 6 cyl engine is more than up to the task.">

Additionally, we also take the features and accessories for the vehicle and place them in the meta keywords tag. While we are taking about keyword tags, if your ‘SEO Expert’ says he needs to optimize your meta keywords for top placement in Google, he is full of shit. The reason for this is Google completely ignores the keywords tag (see Matt Cutts video below). The only reason we put the meta keywords in the web page is for the other search engines that still use this legacy tag.

Great Read: Rework

Sun, 27 Jun 2010 17:51:00 -0400

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

You can find the book on Amazon — but this wasn’t where I got it myself. This was one of the books I choose as part of my get two free books from Audible (thanks Leo Laporte/TWiT). I would provide the direct link to Audible’s page for Rework, but since their webmaster is too busy with link tracking codes in the URL param that force the page to break when you remove them, I decided to give Amazon the link (they provide a quick short-url on their page for easy linking—brilliant!)

Autotrader vs Cars.com

Sat, 26 Jun 2010 19:05:27 -0400

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.
I provide websites for used car dealers and part of my system automatically delivers data updates to both cars.com and autotrader. The feedback I get from my dealers who are using them is really a mixed bag. A lot of it has to do with what type of vehicle you are selling, who your target audience is and where you are geographically in the country. Some of my dealers will say that cars.com is much better than autotrader and some will say exactly the opposite. Then there are those (probably the majority) who will tell you that both provide enough leads to justify having both.

If you are thinking in terms of whether to go with one or the other, I would say do both, so long as they each provide the leads that justify the expense. Another tip is that both outfits will work with you on the cost of their services and both will offer affordable trial periods to test them out.

Hope this helps -

Albert Dewey
www.auto-corner.com

Customer Bill of Rights

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 22:34:00 -0400

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.

— Steven Carlson
Co-Founder stockNum Systems, LLC.
Creators of AutoCorner

Customer Bill of Rights
stockNum Systems, creators of AutoCorner
begun and held at www.Auto-Corner.com, Tuesday the twenty-second of June, two thousand and ten.

We, the people of AutoCorner, in order to form a more perfect union between new and used car dealerships and their website solution provider, raise the standard of service, provide complete support for those who dare to buck the trend and venture out into the vast uncharted land of the world wide web, do ordain this AutoCorner Customer Bill of Rights.

RIGHT I - You have the right to be satisfied.
Our mission is to provide all customers with 100% satisfaction, every time! Our staff will never be inconvenienced or unprofessional in addressing your needs. We welcome your input, your ideas, and your suggestions. Should you have any complaint that you feel deserves more attention, please contact me directly.

RIGHT II - You have the right to a straightforward presentation of your options.
We want you to choose the options that best suit you and your needs. We will never recommend a product or service you do not need.

RIGHT III - You have the right not to be taken to the cleaners.
We will never hi-jack, hold for ransom, or blackmail you for your domain name. As far as we are concerned your domain name is your property and you are free to take it with you should you leave to another service provider (well of course you cannot be behind in your bill).

RIGHT IV - You have the right not to be charged ridiculous fees
We do not charge fees for the sake of charging fees. The costs for our services are laid out on our website, as long as you pay on-time you are good. We do charge a $29 late fee if you are 30 past due. Besides that, we do not have any hidden gotcha fees.

RIGHT V - You have the right to a powerful, easy-to-use, and uncluttered system
We do not believe in adding extra buttons and boxes to our interface just to have them there. This just makes for a confusing interface. Each button in our system is for a specific task and is clearly labeled as such. If it isn’t needed, we don’t put it there.

RIGHT VI - You have the right to be inspired
We provide you with the tools to be inspired to do great things with your dealership. Step out and have a little fun while you do it!

Vehicle Photo Tips for Car Dealers

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 12:22:00 -0400

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 use this spot for all your photos because this gives your site a more professional and cleaner look to it. You line up your cars on your lot all nice and neat; your website should have the same appearance.
A bright overcast day is perfect for taking photos outside. This will prevent unwanted glare from reflecting off the car or from the camera lens being blinded by direct sunlight.
Make sure the vehicle is recently washed. You don’t want to show a photo of a car that is covered in dirt.
If you are forced to take photos of your vehicles in the winter with snow on the ground and the car is still on your lot come springtime, you will want to take a fresh set of photos so as to not give away the fact that the car has been on the lot for a long time.
When using a digital camera hold the camera steady for an extra second after the shutter is pressed. Moving the camera right away after snapping the shutter will often result in the vehicle appearing off center in the resulting photo. This is because there is often a short time delay between the moment you press the shutter button and the camera actually taking the picture.
Center the vehicle properly in the camera viewfinder. It is often better to use a camera with a LCD screen on the back so you can be sure the vehicle is properly positioned in the frame. The problem is that often the viewfinder shows a larger field of view than the camera actually will record in the photo.
Don’t stand too far back from the vehicle. You want it to be clearly visible in the picture and not be too far away that details are not clear to the website visitor.
Set your camera settings to produce smaller and more compressed images. The difference being a hi-rez pic (1280x1140 - uncompressed) will be something like 500,000 bytes in size and a smaller image (800x600 - compressed) will only be about 60,000 bytes or about 1/10th the file size. The website system management is going to shrink your photos anyway to make them to fit your page so you won’t be gaining anything by uploading hi-rez pics.

Subject Matter

Your first photo should be from the left front of the vehicle so that you can see both the front end and driver’s side of the vehicle equally.
Your second photo should be a side view of the vehicle.
Your third photo should be a right rear view of the vehicle so that you can see both the rear end and passenger side of the vehicle equally.
Your fourth photo should be a shot of the interior of the vehicle as seen from standing just outside the driver’s door. This is important for female customers because they are more interested in how the inside of the car looks than a man would be.
Your fifth shot should be reserved for anything special that you would like to show such as the back end of a minivan showing the seats in folded down position or the underhood of a classic ‘65 Mustang showing how the clean the engine is.

Good Photo Examples

Good centering and angle of shot.

Well framed pic.

Vehicle is positioned well and nicely centered.

Good shot of the interior.

Detail showing the back of an SUV.

Nice shot of an engine compartment.

Bad Photo Examples

Shadow of the photographer showing.

Remove the paper floor mats before taking the interior shot. Especially bad if they have greasy footprints on them.

Vehicle is positioned poorly. Too much hood, not enough driver’s side showing.
Please tell the help to get out of the car! He does not come with the deal. (or does he?)

It is now Springtime and this pic still shows the snow from the previous Winter..

Move the vehicle to a place where there is not a pile of debris nearby.

Move the vehicle from its parking space so we can see all of it.

American flags are nice and patriotic but tend to clutter up the pic here.

Not sure what that is in the left of the pic but it is distracting.

Remove the car wash hoses and buckets from around the car where the pic is being taken.

The sign that says ‘BAD’ does not covey much confidence for the quality of this car.
Lighting is all wrong, too much dark shadowing. The car is very difficult to see clearly.

In Summary

It is not critical that you post 4 or 5 pictures of the vehicle that you have for sale. Some dealers prefer to show just one. Just keep in mind that the photos you put on the internet are meant to show off your inventory to prospective customers. This is not any different from the type of picture that you would want to display if you were posting a personals ad on a matchmaking site. People make their first impressions from what they see and will judge you and your business accordingly. For this reason it is important that you take the extra time to see to it that your photos are well taken because it could mean the difference between a website visitor actually buying a car from you or taking their business somewhere else.

Advice for a Newbie to SEO: Used Car Dealership website review

Fri, 18 Jun 2010 12:35:00 -0400

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 to better your website.

As mentioned before, your title tags, meta keywords, and meta descriptions are too long, far too wordy, and are not unique to each page. Now while we are on the subject of meta keywords, Google has already stated they pretty much ignore meta keywords, but I still think you should spend the time to use well worded keywords (keep it short) for the other search engines to pickup on.
Each of your pages (homepage, inventory pages, and vehicle details pages) all use far too many JavaScript and CSS files. It is far better to strip out the relevant codes needed for the page and load only what is needed. This single change alone will dramatically decrease your load times, which can increase your Google Page Rank
The link structure to your vehicle listing pages has too many parameters, which causes confusion for Google. If you look at page http://www.ujobucredt.com/autos_asearch.php?te_class=autos&te_mode=table&te_asearch=true&te_qsearch=true
&te_qkeywords=&te_qsearchMode=all&make=BMW — there are 7 parameters for this page. Google will attempt to try out various combination in each one of those parameters. Each time you risk have duplicate content pages which negatively affects your Google Page Rank. 
Your secure credit app has two issues.

First, and most importantly, is the way the site was designed with all of the JavaScript files that must be loaded (see #2) and the fact they are hosted on a different domain (that of your website provider), the customer’s web-browser will show a ‘broken padlock’ rather than a fully secured site. This leaves question and doubt in people’s minds if their information is secure or not.   

Secondly, and I see this all over the internet, when a customer clicks on the secure credit app from your site, he leaves your domain and goes over to autosearchsecure.com. While this is a proper SSL secure connection (keep in mind above), your customers have left your site and, in today’s climate of internet phishing attacks, people are scared. They do not like being taken from one site and moved to another domain. This leaves uncertainty in the minds of some of your customers. SSLs are cheap, and the cost of losing even one sale far outweighs the cost of your SSL certificate for the year.  

The stupid thing is I am pretty sure we are the only dealer management system/website provider that actually registers an SSL (the ‘https’ part) for our customers in their own domain name (ex: www.MyCoolCarDealer.com would get their own SSL at https://www.MyCoolCarDealer.com www.MyCoolCarDealer.com would get their own SSL at https://www.MyCoolCarDealer.com). This way, the customer never leaves your domain. 
Technical glitch - On your homepage when you hover over your ‘Share This’, link the Flash animation on your homepage disappears. Also, while we are on the subject of Flash: Unless you need Flash (ex: you are building an interactive application that would be too complicated in JavaScript), do not use Flash. If you just want a picture of a car blinking and spinning around, then honestly skip the Flash. There are a few reason for this:  

a) iPod/iPhone/iPad users cannot see your site. This is a large share of your market that you are basically saying “screw off” to. see ( http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ )  

b) Your customers that do see this do not care. Honestly, they do not. Having a pretty car spinning around isn’t going to encourage them to buy from you any more than if you didn’t have that Flash animation. In fact, you may just annoy the customer enough to skip past your site. Also keep in mind that flash animation is slowing down the loading of your homepage.
When choosing “Browse Inventory”, it is given too many choices, yet they are not given the one choice they want, to find a car. What happens if I am looking to purchase a car? I click on the inventory link, but I am not sure what make I want. I just know I want a car. I see an option for 4-Door Compact Passenger Cars. Okay, I want to save money. Let me start there. I click on that and, after looking at the inventory, I do not find what I want. What do I do? Most people would just leave and go to your competitor (and don’t fool yourself, that is what the customer just did). But what if you had a really nice car in your 4-door Mid-Size Passenger Car category? I completely overlooked that and moved on. Personally, I think you should give the option do you want a ‘Car, Truck, SUV, or Van’, then let them look through the categories that way. Of course, you should also provide a search if they know they want that BMW 325i.
Security problem: You should NEVER have a login link to your backend management area located on a public facing site. At the bottom of your homepage, there is a little ‘key’ picture, and clicking on that takes you to the management login area of your site. You just gave a would-be hacker 1 of the 3 pieces of information he needed to guess to hack into your site. Can’t you just bookmark/favorite the login page in your browser?
The homepage appears to be very cluttered. When a user goes to your website, you need to provided them a quick way to find 2 things: What you have for sale and where you are located.
On your vehicle pages, try putting the make/model information as the first part of the <title> tags, before you company name. There is a very strategic reason for this and it is very simple once you think the way your customer will find you. Unless they already know of your website (then in that case SEO is not of importance), they will find you in Google by typing something like “BMW 325i Kennett Square”. They will not be search for ‘Defilippo Brothers’ (as above comment, if they were SEO would not be of importance in this case, because, of course, you should already rank well on your own company name). By putting the make/model first it will show up in Google like this:

Also, notice that each vehicle has a custom written description in the results. Now, look at how yours currently shows in Google:

Each description is just a list of keywords (those dang meta keywords you are currently using). But think of this from the perspective of your customer: Which link would you click on?

I hope I haven’t offended you, as I am just trying to help out. I wish you the best!

Steven

Carfax's new Price Calculator....Will they lose customers

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 21:35:00 -0400

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 this: http://www.carfax.com/VehicleHistory/p/Report.cfx?partner=DLR_3&vin=WBSNB93566B582767&zipCode

Personally, I think this is bad for the car buying customer, as it will place an unrealistic expectation for a discount off the sale price of the vehicle. For some dealers that have padded multiple thousands in the list price, this may not be a problem, but for many of my customers, they sell for $500 to a $1000 over their cost. With this arbitrary value placed on the report, the dealer is forced to discount the price even if the “problem” has been properly remedied by repair.

What do you think? Let me know.

Stealing Customer's Domain Names is Wrong...

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 17:08:00 -0400

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 it is common practice.

Over the past few months I have been noticing a horrible trend of website providers refusing to allow their customer (used car dealerships) to transfer their domain name away from their current service provider to a new provider. In my case, we have recently experienced a surge in customers abandoning their higher-cost system for our more affordable and capable system, AutoCorner. This has presented a problem for some of our competitors that are beginning to feel the squeeze. In an effort to delay the mass exodus away from their service, they are saying, “If we registered the domain name, we own it”. Basically, they are really saying, “If you don’t pay us money, you lose your domain name…screw you”.

Now, before I continue, I will concede there are a few cases in which I will not transfer a domain name away from my server.

If the customer owes me money for services rendered (not stupid arbitrary fees, actual cost of services provided)
If I owned the domain prior to them using my service, and they were just leasing the domain from me

If it isn’t one of those two reasons and a customer chooses to leave, they are free to take their domain with them. It doesn’t matter if we registered the domain name for them, or they had it prior to using our system. As far as I am concerned, their domain name is their property, and they are entitled to take it with them when they leave.

Going beyond the potential legal ramifications of (and I am not a lawyer, so this is just my opinion) holding a domain name hostage, black-mail, extortion, tortuous loss of revenue and/or theft by conversion, I think of it from a strategic business standpoint. If a customer leaves from me and, for whatever reason, they find that the “grass isn’t greener on the other side of the fence”. I want them to remember me and my business in a positive light. Can anyone honestly say that if you drag your feet and refuse to allow the domain to be transferred, the customer will ever come back to you? Not to mention the bad word he will be saying about you on the street.

So, you are probably wondering how to protect yourself from having your domain name stolen.

Register your own domain name. They are cheap under $10 a year with GoDaddy, and you are set. While you are there, register it for 10 years. You’ll save money and protect yourself form forgetting to renew next year and losing the domain that way.
If you allow your web site provider to register, make sure they put in the contract that you are the rightful owner of the domain name and that it goes with you if you ever wish to leave. We (AutoCorner) have it in our customer’s contract that we will register the domain on the behalf of the customer, but they own it and can take it with them if they leave—well, of course, you must pay your bill first :)

Tell me about your experiences. Has your hosting or web site provider ever done this to you? How does it make you feel when they treat you like this?

Deciding Where to File

Tue, 15 Jun 2010 15:54:25 -0400

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 …”

Using frames for vehicle inventory is a no no!

Tue, 15 Jun 2010 13:08:00 -0400

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 for sale at all coming from your domain name. This is because all your cars that you have for sale are all listed under another domain (your dealership management system in this case) and all you are accomplishing by doing this is improving the rank of your website provider to the expense of your own domain.

The logic behind this is as follows: I can easily create a site and put a frame in it that contains the contents of any site on the web that I choose. For example, I can frame the entire website microsoft.com in my personal homepage. Google looks at only the content that comes from my own domain in determining my rank. They are smart enough to know that the content that comes from microsoft.com does not belong to me and I get absolutely no credit for it at all.

I know that this has strayed from the initial topic here but I felt obliged to bring it up because I see many dealers making this mistake and since all dealers want to get the best Google rank possible (which does have to do with the initial topic here) I thought I would pass along this important bit of useful information.

AutoCorner System

Tue, 15 Jun 2010 13:00:00 -0400

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 data from Dealer Specialties
Import vehicle data from third party apps such as Desklot
Effectively manage your vehicle listings on your own website
Manage customer inquiries made through your website
Track vehicle sales, costs, interest and more.
Customize your vehicle management tools to suit your needs
… and so much more - see full features list

Beyond the legalities: Concepts for Successful Business

Tue, 15 Jun 2010 12:57:00 -0400

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 your honest business. Piss them off and they will surely tell everyone about your rip-off tactics. The difference being that honesty will result in much lower customer acquisition costs over time and dishonesty will always increase the cost of doing business no matter how you slice it.

Several reasons not to use Flash

Tue, 15 Jun 2010 12:43:00 -0400

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 dive into the actual flash code to allocate the words you want to have read by search engines.

2) Your customers really don’t care about the fancy flash presentation in your website. Yes your menu has a wonderful glowing effect when a mouse is hovered over it and the speakers crackle with Star Trek noises but do you honestly believe that this has ANY influence at all in your customers deciding whether to buy a car from you? Not one bit. They are there to check out your inventory, see what your specials might be and to maybe check out your embedded Google map on where to find you. Other than that, all your fancy website huff and puff is little more than a guy dressed like a pimp trying to get a date with the prom queen. It just makes you look ridiculous. Keep your website simple and professional looking and you will get a lot more mileage out of it than trying to look like some jackass who has to have the largest Christmas light display on the block.

3) Flash is totally useless on things like the iPhone and iPad and other similar products. This is because they were made with a thing called “gestures” using your finger movements to control what is happening on the screen. Virtually all flash presentations out there are coded to rely on mouse-over interactions to make things like menus to appear and other similar effects. Since the iPhone and iPad don’t use a mouse, every flash app out there that depends on this for navigation purposes or the like would be totally broken when viewed on any of these devices which explains one of the reasons that Steve Jobs refuses to allow it to run. With this in mind, the flash portion of every website out there would have to be recoded to work with gestures which is something that I am sure is not going to happen anytime soon.

4) Anything else that you have come to depend upon flash to perform (movies, animations, etc.) can most likely be handled with simple javascript, css, and basic html. Now when it comes to what css3 and html5 are going to be offering in the very near future, you can bet your bottom dollar that they will pretty much completely seal the lid on the coffin of flash at that time. Not only that but html, css and javascript are totally open languages that are not under the developmental control of one company’s influence. Flash, on the other hand, is totally owned and operated by Adobe and is a closed and proprietary system. If something were to happen to Adobe as a company, where would your support and improvements come from that would allow you to stay current with ever changing technologies. Not a problem with javascript, html or css. I, for one, am hedging my bets on the open source languages to withstand the test of time.

Editing Your Hosts File Can Kill Web Bugs and Spyware!

Sun, 13 Jun 2010 19:48:00 -0400

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 “find file” search to locate it on your machine.

In this file you will see a line that contains an IP address followed by the word “localhost”. It should look something like this -

127.0.0.1 localhost

Now, on a new line, simply copy the same IP address followed by a tab spacing and put in the domain for “didtheyreadit.com”. You should now have an entry that looks something like this -

127.0.0.1 didtheyreadit.com

Save the file and that’s it. What will now happen is that instead of going out on the internet to find the domain name “didtheyreadit.com”, this entry in your HOSTS file will force your machine into thinking that this domain resides on your own machine. Unable to find anything meaningful when it makes the search, it will just give up trying and you will have stopped the bug dead in its tracks. No fuss, no muss.

This trick also works for other applications that reach out across the internet and report your activities to servers. One example would be if you were to be a user of DAP (Download Accelerator Plus) which goes out across the internet to retrieve ad images to display within the program. Simply update your HOSTS file with the address that DAP is trying to connect to and assign it to your localhost IP and presto, no more ads in the application. (well, almost no more because DAP saves a copy of these ads on your hard drive and you will have to delete them as well to completely eliminate them)

Pretty much all you have to do for any such application like this is to figure out the domain that it is trying to connect to on the net and you now have the power to kill its activities as you see fit. Works for spyware, adware, you name it.

Another use for this trick is if you are a webmaster. I often wind up getting a new account that already has a website going but they want me to redo the site and host it on one of my servers and cancel the account where they are. In order to not have to shut down their existing account while I am developing their new site, I will create an account for their new site on my server and modify the HOSTS file on my computer so that their domain name points to the IP address of my server. This way I can have a private connection to their new site’s location for development purposes and when I need to drop by the customer’s office to show them the progress of their new site, I simply modify the HOSTS file (temporarily of course) on their machine and they can view their new site as well.

One final note and that is that often a trojan or virus will rewrite your HOSTS file so that certain domain names will appear there in an attempt to hijack your surfing activities. For example you may see an entry in it for Google.com associated with an IP address. This is likely there to hijack your attempts to connect to Google and steer you to the IP address in the HOSTS file instead.

It is a good idea to occasionally check your HOSTS file to prevent yourself from becoming a victim of phishing. For example, imagine a trojan or activeX component infected your machine and put in an entry in your HOSTS file that redirected your connection to PayPal’s login page to a spoof page that looks just like PayPal’s page. The address bar at the top of your browser is unchanged but you are not at the real PayPal site. Instead, when you enter your login details, thinking that you are logging into your account, you are instead submitting your data to some hackers machine in China somewhere. Scary, isn’t it?

A clever person could get around this to some extent by making a batch file that rewrites your HOSTS file with a clean valid copy every time your start your machine.

Tables vs CSS - I'm Tired of the Whole Argument!

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 19:51:00 -0400

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 world is a messy place and it is your job to see to it that visitors to your clients’ sites are able to see the site with reasonable correctness and that they are presented with a clean design and decently organized information.

If this means that you have to use tables as needed to ensure cross browser compatibility, then so be it. In my opinion, it is not a sin to use tables to create a basic site skeleton and then use CSS to decorate and organize the content within. I have had much greater success with this approach and my sites’ layouts stand fast regardless of the browser. Using strictly “div” tags for everything, while cool and techie sounding, can get you into trouble with some browsers not properly handling width values and things like that, usually resulting in the whole layout blowing up in one way or another.

When I refer to the skeleton of the page I usually restrict this to a top area for the logo. Below this there is the menu area on the left (or right) and the main content area next to this. At the bottom I have the standard footer area. By using a simple table layout for these basic elements and specifying the widths involved, I am assured that at least the orientation of the vital elements (logo, menu, content, and footer) are in their proper place.

An example of the simple wrapper that I use is as follows:

[logo][menu][content][footer]

Not much to it, is there? I consider this small amount just a little insurance so that visitors to my sites will at least see the basic components of the website in their proper places. Consider it to be similar to the noscript and /noscriptto have an alternate to your javascripting for visitors with that disabled.

For all the content within this basic table structure I use fairly exhaustive style sheet instructions that define borders, text decorations, margins, all that sort of stuff. This is a strategy that allows me to quickly and accurately build pages for my clients and one that ensures that they load properly in the broadest range of browsers possible.

For me, entertaining the argument of ‘compliant browser this’ and ‘noncompliant browser that’ is not what my job description is. My customers don’t care about these issues and I am not being paid to complain about them either. What I am being paid to do is to create good looking, easy to maintain, and functional sites that make my client money. Like I said, it is a messy world out there and you are expected to produce results because you are the professional and pros do what it takes to get the job done. That’s why we get paid the big bucks.