Anyone interested in purchasing a dealer website theme?

[Chris Cachor]

It's desktop only but executed well. Will work on any CMS or Wordpress. 4 theme color variations. Perfect for those looking to run their sites in-house.

Note: Mod's if this is against the rules please remove my post. I figured it might generate some interest.

 

[craigh]

We should talk

 

[RichardHyland]

I was looking for a unique WordPress powered template for selling cars and auto parts online for a long time. Apart from some car related themes at TemplateMonster (http://www.templatemonster.com/properties/features/bootstrap-templates/), which I find quite versatile and highly customizable with unlimited color variations, the majority of the available templates seem to have poor coding and can't be tweaked easily to suit my needs. The overall look of this theme you are offering seems very promising, though.

 

[Alexander Lau]

@RichardHyland, etc. I develop as well as market, you're going to find it awfully difficult to find a WordPress theme or the like that suffices for all of the dealer website requirements out there today. Forget out of the box solutions (they aren't going to work for you and the support is generally shit), you'd be smarter to go with a theme that was developed by someone in the automotive industry itself, such as what @Chris Cachor is offering and I have absolutely no connection to Chris at all.

That said, if you're looking for something basic, which isn't really going to help you with most users today (they're looking for more), there are plenty of amateur, poorly supported options at the likes of ThemeForest, etc. However, unless you've years of experience using WP, you're probably going to struggle setting up and maintaining a site using these types of themes. Mind you, none of these developers truly understand the requirements needed to facilitate a proper inventory-based, dealer website.

IMO, this is why groups like Dealer Inspire, DealerOn, etc. have been incredibly successful. They get it, you can have all of the flexibility of WordPress with customization and back-end / API hooks. Their flexible themes, widgets and components are developed with an understanding that requirements change. It's what you pay for with them. You're not going to get that with out of the box solutions.

 

[nickb]

@RichardHyland,

IMO, this is why groups like Dealer Inspire, etc. have been incredibly successful. They get it, you can have all of the flexibility of WordPress with customization and back-end / API hooks. Their flexible themes, widgets and components are developed with an understanding that requirements change. It's what you pay for with them. You're not going to get that with out of the box solutions.

Then what happens when you want to switch vendors? What happens to all of your SEO content that had built up traffic a strong authority on google? The problem I see is at the end of the day the vendors owns you and your content, when you want to switch you throw away all that money that was spent building traffic. Why not own your site, pay an SEO writer and run your operations like you need to, hire freelance when needed.

Thoughts?

 

[Chris Cachor]

Then what happens when you want to switch vendors? What happens to all of your SEO content that had built up traffic a strong authority on google? The problem I see is at the end of the day the vendors owns you and your content, when you want to switch you throw away all that money that was spent building traffic. Why not own your site, pay an SEO writer and run your operations like you need to, hire freelance when needed.

Thoughts?

This can be a good idea for larger groups that can afford the full time salaries. It will take the team some time to get acclimated to auto retail, though, so that's one thing to keep in mind. This is what the big guys like AutoNation do. I'm sure there's a few others, but I think most of the time owners would prefer to keep as much salary off their books as they can.

I'm not an SEO guy, but from what I understand the domain's history is often more important than some of the inner content pages. From my experience, a dealer leaving one vendor for another doesn't take as much of a hit as you'd think, especially for domains that have had a lot of traffic pointed at it for awhile. This is my opinion, but I think SEO writers are a waste of resources. These days, you've got to pay for traffic, period.