Pulling the vendor trigger for my new dealership, advice?

[DakanGK]

Thanks Craig and Mike, these are great leaping off points. Right on in the CRM discussion as I thought in poking around the Sugar, wow this is a bit in-depth and like many of the other products, it doesn't make sense yet. I'll look into Highrise.

Craig brings up a great point that I am rather concerned with in designing an automotive specific site to have the excepted features and plug-ins that are not just going to showcase nice pictures of cars, but sell them effectively. I can certainly use best practices from other well designed car sites and A/B test on my own or with my designer, but as Craig mentioned, unless I am committing to WP for the long term, it will cost something more valuable than money at this point, and that is time.

My last experience in building a pretty simple site with a young WordPress design team took MONTHS longer than planned and was nowhere near as media rich as I envision a slick car site to be. To me, that means that I most certainly can't teach myself all of the necessary WordPress design quickly, perhaps I'm wrong. Although custom sounds right up my alley, if it can't be developed and live within a shorter time-frame (1.5+ month?) and give the same feature set for the customer as a dedicated, overpriced vendor then it makes the choice harder as that is a known development time and cost.

Thoughts?

Regards,
Glen

 

[craigh]

Although custom sounds right up my alley, if it can't be developed and live within a shorter time-frame (1.5+ month?) and give the same feature set for the customer as a dedicated, overpriced vendor then it makes the choice harder as that is a known development time and cost.

I can't really speak for anyone else because the reason I started doing what I do was because of terrible response time from our dealership website providers. That said, it shouldn't take that long to get going. If you are willing to add the inventory manually until you grow, you wouldn't even need to have an inventory feed. You need a VIN decoder, photo management, content management and a front-end theme wrapped around an automotive "framework".

It's not that simple, but most of the dealer sites providers are going to have their basic setup and then they change it visually and, if you're lucky, tailor it to what you want (ie: design based around low inventory count). The other issue is whether or not you're willing to jump into the $600-$1000 monthly expense of a full-blown dealer website right out of the gate.

If you want custom development from a non-automotive company, I would say 1.5+ months is inevitable.