After doing a bit of research, we discovered that 90% of car dealership websites were "site-as-service" websites. Each car dealership pays a monthly or annual fee for their website — which often amounts to tens of thousands of dollars each year, but they never actually "own" their website. Once they stop paying the monthly fees, their site goes away and they have nothing to show for their investment.
Another disadvantage to using the "dealer website" service is that your site looks and functions the same as everyone else's. You have little space for improvement and no opportunity to stand out.
Customized design and development
The staff at Ehrlich Toyota really wanted to differentiate themselves from the competition, and they realized they would not be able to accomplish this by renting a pre-fab website. They needed to have a powerful, custom built website.
As the Variant Studios team began development of the new Ehrlich Toyota website, we realized that as a whole, dealership websites have too many features, too many options, too many buttons — too much noise to truly be effective. Working closely with the Ehrlich Internet Sales team we stripped the site down to the essentials, made vehicle search simple and did away with endlessly scrolling pages — so that all of the most important information would fit on one screen.
To simplify navigation, we added a unique drop-down "Mega Menu" which gives you access to nearly every page in the site at once, making it easy to get around.
Most importantly, the entire site was built on the Drupal content management system, which enables the Ehrlich staff to easily manage the site content on their own.
Search engine optimization
Prior to the development of their new site, Ehrlich Toyota's entire store inventory was displayed on their website using an iFrame provided by a third-party service. Although site visitors could view the car and truck inventory, iFrame format meant Google and other search engines couldn't see any of this content.
With the launch of the new site, the entire vehicle inventory is now automatically downloaded each night and a unique page is created for each vehcle. Each vehicle page also has an automated page URL and Meta content, which search engines love. This feature alone has tripled the size of the site and will greatly increase the site's visiblity.
