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Launching our Dealer.Com site tomorrow....

Andrew Carr

Made Draw
Jan 19, 2010
34
2
First Name
Andy
Tomorrow I go through my first switch of web site companies as we leave Reynolds in favor of our new Dealer.com site.

I have been trying to work this out since the first month I became internet manager. I am excited about it and at the same time concerned that the whole thing dosen't fall on it's face since it's something I don't think my owner was particularly wild about doingand it was my idea. The dealership has been with Reynolds for as long as they have had a web site.

I still have some fine tuning to do...getting new photos of staff, etc. but you can see my progress so far here:
Dave Mungenast Alton Toyota | New Toyota dealership in Alton, IL 62002

I appreciate any input. I re-designed my Reynolds site once, but it was nowhere near as big of a change as this is for us.

I am also going to be using the Lead Management Tool that comes with the site. Does anyone have any experience with this or best practices? Is anyone else using it in combination with Reynolds CRM? Any suggestions?

I do want to mention that so far my experience with Dealer.com has been top-notch. My account manager, development person and product rep have been nothing short of awesome to work with. I'm not used to asking for something and having it done sooner than a week or so and I'm not used to the level of support I have gotten so far.

Hope you all have a great March!
 
Andrew,

My biggest piece of advice is to build Toyota Recall pages. Instead of directing the customer to Toyota, take that traffic for yourself. This is what we did: Toyota Recall Information on Floormat and Gas Pedal

Building quick pages is very easy in Page Builder. I noticed your Military Discount and College Grad program pages are also linking to Toyota - take that content and put it on your own site. You never want to build your site to "leak" back to other sites - you want to keep a customer on your site.

Here's something that could help you spice up the About Us page: 3 steps to setting up an About Me Page

Just one more thing. When we first switched to Dealer.com, I felt like I needed to use every page they built in their default. Today, I barely use half of them. You can turn anything on and off you want.....or use Page Builder to make a very customized finance landing page vs. just using the default finance center page DDC has. You might want to consider the number of navigation items you're giving your customer to choose from - there are a lot. Instead of using the Nav at the top, you could try to use sidebars on interior pages themselves.
 
Congrats on the new site. I'm jealous - our dealership has been with Reynolds for the past 12 years and our website shows it. Their WebmakerX templates have the feel of a Windows program from 1992 - I feel like Minesweeper is about to pop out any minute.

When I came on board about 4 months ago, I was shocked by its look, its features, SEO etc. I made quite the pitch for Dealer.com - Tim kelly over there did a great job trying to sell it to our GSM and GM. In the end, Reynolds got another 12mo. contract out of us, based on them ending their WebmakerX platform (by April 1) and a few other things.

Before you cancelled your contract, did Reynolds pitch you on this platform change that is supposedly coming?
 
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Thanks to all for the pointers.

Alex, I get what you are saying on incorporating that info into our site instead of linking out. I would agree and I will look to do something along those lines as we move forward.

So far everything works great. I am not experiencing any of the issues you described and I had plenty of time (about 2 weeks) with the beta before we launched...I have some odds and ends to take care of (photos of our staff, service and parts specials, etc.) but it is still a huge improvement over our last site.

I am not really using the lead lifycycle thing. I would like to, but I generally assign the next task as I complete the current task and have found that is the best way to handle each lead.

So far I am using lead manager in place of Reynolds CRM and I like it a lot better.
 
Andrew, congrats on the new site.

Most of my experiences with dealer.com and deploying new OEM sites have been pretty seamless.

I am a little peeved that they want to charge me $150 to place some tracking code on one of my sites. Can you imagine the bill on this if you had over 50 dealer websites and needed tracking code dropped on all your sites? Be sure you get your code dropped in there before they so live with the site...maybe they will cut you a break.
 
Andrew, congrats on the new site.

Most of my experiences with dealer.com and deploying new OEM sites have been pretty seamless.

I am a little peeved that they want to charge me $150 to place some tracking code on one of my sites. Can you imagine the bill on this if you had over 50 dealer websites and needed tracking code dropped on all your sites? Be sure you get your code dropped in there before they so live with the site...maybe they will cut you a break.

I just ran into this as well. I'm slightly peeved as well about that.