I recently built two car dealership websites and would appreciate some feeback

[SebastianWeb]

Hi everyone,

This is my first time posting here. I’m a web designer and developer based in Europe—more specifically, Romania. Lately, I’ve been focusing on building websites for local car dealerships.

I don’t intend to sell anything directly—I’m mainly interested in exchanging value and learning from your experience. Hopefully, I can help as well by offering suggestions or feedback on your websites. Feel free to ask me anything!

Recently, I got in touch with a dealership owner from the UK who really appreciated the work I did on two of my projects and asked about a possible redesign. Long story short, I started analyzing car dealership websites in the UK and realized he was absolutely right—many of them still look very “2010-ish.” While I understand that design isn’t always the top priority and functionality often comes first, I was surprised by how outdated many local dealership sites look.

Here are two of my recent projects for reference:

DarAutoCenter & AutoSMG

They are clean looking, and maybe they can serve as inspiration from a design and UX perspective.

Both websites are built on WordPress, but the design and functionality are fully custom-made by me. Some important features that might not be obvious at first glance:

• Custom database tables (with decent hosting, you can add thousands of vehicles without performance issues)
• Fully custom design (icons, info cards, vehicle pages, etc.)
• Custom vehicle status badges (available, sold, reserved, etc.)
• Advanced filters and detailed vehicle specifications
• Easy-to-use dealer dashboard, optimized for adding cars directly from mobile
• Stock management dashboard (availability, pricing, discounts, vehicle status, etc.)
• (Not implemented yet, but possible) Custom finance application forms and finance calculator

I’ve found that I genuinely enjoy building car dealership websites, and in the near future I’d like to start approaching the UK and US markets.

From your perspective, what features are most important or missing from typical dealership websites in your region? What would you personally want or need as a dealer?

Thanks in advance—I’d really appreciate your feedback.

 

[TJThompson]

Couple thoughts:
I'm surprised you have no 'sorting' options on the SRP (realize not a lot of cars, but nevertheless)
I'd personally not be putting my social links up at the top prominently.
(You may have paid good money to get people there and now you are trying to get them to go elsewhere where you can't sell them the car). Personally I think you should work to get people 'from' social to your site, not from your site to social whenever possible. Way less distractions and way more intent
on the homepage i wouldn't offer filtering by price at this point. You may be filtering out a car that is 'just out of their range but would love'. Use sorting on the SRP for that. No one should be that deterministic on the homepage.
Show as much related as possible and they can remove as they go