Interactive Car Site

How an ‘Interactive car site’ should be?

Introduction

Interactive media is emerging as a prominent feature of websites these days. From AJAX to Flash to streaming movies, they all provide a rich user experience. Advertisers were never out of mediums to sell their ideas and products to the people. Now information is available from all over the world at home. The automobile industry is emerging as an important user of the Internet for its various activities.

Page Ratings of a Site

A car site owner has to plan in such a way that the strategy includes enhancing user experience through interactive mediums. It is more beneficial to the car site owner if there are 500 visitors who view 10 pages per visit rather than 2,000 visitors of which 90% exit as soon as they hit the home page.

Design Factor of an Interactive Car Site

A professional design might decide if your next website will be a success or not. The site should not be drowned with Flash players and AJAX with car images that take for ever to load; rather they should use these media types thoughtfully, in order to strike the right balance between getting users to their car site and then keeping them there to close the deal. The site should provide the exact information that a person is looking for and also be interactive and fun. Successful car salesmen don’t work in the parking lot, they make it attractive for buyers to come into the showroom and not leave without a new set of car keys.

A car portal’s web design should focus on their target group and address specific needs of visitors. The site should include a home page that immediately interests the target audience while clearing portraying the company's market niche. Other pages should cover information about the products being offered with product details including images and specifications such as cars available in a particular city, special features of the car, the price of the car, dealers close to the visitor’s residence or place of convenience, and so on. Inquiry forms, such as car loan applications or car insurance applications, should be technically incorporated. A general form to contact the portal or customer care department should be on the site’s contact page.

Benefits from a Quality Design on the World Wide Web

Large companies gain greater benefits through a website than a smaller enterprise. However, regardless of the company's size, products developed, or location, any company can certainly benefit from having a customized high quality presence in the virtual world. People around the world search websites through search engines and if they enter the appropriate key word(s) /phrases, they are immediately shown multiple websites relevant to the search words or term used. Once the user selects a website from the displayed list of a search engine he is able to access the company’s products, history, development process, prices, and delivery procedures, etc. Design and usability of the website will increase the number of leads or sales prospects.

A common mistake seen in car website development is that the information provided is the same content as the actual traditional marketing material such as brochures, manuals, newspaper articles, radio or TV ads, and so on. The World Wide Web is a completely different media type and therefore needs to be used in a more appropriate manner. First of all, it is an interactive media; therefore the user needs to be actively involved during the navigation experience of the website, such as a 360 degree car animation or a forum or a blog posting option. If the website is not interactive, the user has only passive involvement that is provided by any other media source, which leads to loss of interest and eventually a quick exit from the website.

Defining the content and design of a website includes organizing it, finalizing a layout, easy navigation, providing user-friendly content, and inserting user-friendly attention-grabbing interactive material to give the user an unforgettable experience. Maintaining the tone and look of the website throughout its pages, keeping in mind the target audience is extremely important. The tone and feel of the website decides the sort of target audience that the website is trying to attract.

Value Added Service

When looking for information about cars, the first thing a browser expects the site to be is user-friendly. The car site should provide accurate information because time is precious and the quicker a site provides accurate and quality data, the better it will perform. The site should present information in an easy-to-understand method. People visiting a car site are not auto experts, they are looking for certain information that will facilitate their car buying or selling, and if the website does not satisfy these basic requirements, then there is another competitor site that will.

Keeping a close watch on all competitor websites to stay a step ahead is a part of the game. Having a team dedicated to track the changes that various competitor websites are making, be it offers, design, or services provided is a good step to ensure that the website is and stays better than others. Trumping the competition with better offers brings better traffic to your site. Developing original ideas and continuously changing and developing a website to introduce more and better information and interactive features is definitely a great way to get a site noticed.

Important players

Auto makers are heavy online advertisers. A recent US survey revealed that more than 85% of car buyers prefer to use the internet for research prior to purchase. With the help of web analytics, car site owners can monetize the value of having interactive media on their websites. Some analytics packages are advanced enough to correlate their users’ behavior with interactive media with the conversions such as form completions or purchases. In order to stay up-to-date, search engines release spiders that are more intelligent and able to easily index content found within Flash and media files.

Some automotive sites, like Vehix.com [1] are already leading a visitor’s experience with video. This site is privately held and based in Salt Lake City; it devotes the top of the home page to its Vehix TV initiative that among other things features a new set of video buying guides. It is very useful as it extends the amount of time people spend on the site, while giving the user an enjoyable experience. The more information a user has the more ready they are to buy. The other car sites that used video was Edmunds.com, [2] which last year began producing “interactive vehicle tours” for new cars, but stopped that effort after studying their site visitors’ behavior and taking into account their feedback. This reveals that the popularity of the site purely depends on the visitor’s reaction and that Edmunds is known as a database that contains data and more data.

Key factors for a site

Some key factors identified as having the most impact on overall satisfaction with a website visit are:

• Information reliability and website functionality

• An eye-catching and pleasing web design

• Direct links that allow information to be found quickly

• Easily understandable user-friendly navigation to various sections

These key factors play an extremely important role in the success of any website, whether automotive or not.

About Indian Interactive Car Sites

Why talk about India? Because it is currently the fastest growing car sector in the developing world. The Indian economy is booming and so is the Indian Automobile Industry and the Internet is a very important information source for the Indian marketplace.

Interactive car sites are almost an alien concept in India. Among the various car sites in India, Carazoo.com seems to be the only Indian car portal that has made an effort to be interactive with its users. It features 360 degree interactive animations and blogs, reviews, images, articles, and various other features that make it quite an interesting portal. Recently, they have started showing car interiors in 360 animations.

Conclusion

Interactive car sites require features that are fun and make a user stay and browse. It is not a very difficult task, but it definitely needs a lot of planning. This is definitely a closer step to having an e-buying world that is fast, convenient, and competitive.