How to get a car dealer website designed?

• Hire a freelance designer – This can be one way to get your car dealer website designed. However, this often does not yield fast results and your results may vary greatly. If you are aware of design trends and marketing tips, you can get your site designed by a freelance designer but, if you are not well versed in exactly what you need and how to communicate it to someone, it is always better to opt for a professional design firm.
• Take professional service – This is a great way to get a custom car dealer website designed as it requires very little time and effort from the dealer. So, if you are not aware of the various aspects of an automotive website, sit back and relax. A professional automotive website design firm will know exactly what could suit your business needs. A rare few of these web providers also provide car inventory marketing solutions to ensure that not only your website looks amazing, but also it gets maximum exposure for your entire inventory. This helps your business get an increased presence on the internet, which automatically increase your offline potential client base. You can take advantage of various add-ons that come with the design of your automotive website. These help in boosting the lead generating capacity of the website.

More about automotive SEO marketing

A very important part of automotive marketing is automotive Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This service consists primarily of gathering relevant one-way back links to your website in order to increase its ranking in the SERP (Search Engine Results Pages) results. In-depth on page SEO techniques also help ensure better ranking. In this way automotive Search Engine Optimization boosts your business prospects by making your car dealer website dominate the market on all major search results.

How to make your car dealer website work for you?

• Your website must display your dealer inventory to users in real time.
• It must get your inventory indexed by the major search engines
• Stays withing compliance standards for OEM
• Highlight your USP and specials ads
• Have custom tabs and forms specific to your need
• Attract attention of prospective clients
• Build credibility for your business in the market
• Generate leads spontaneously
• User friendly
• Easy to maintain

When you hire professional car dealer website designers, you must ensure that you get all these benefits in your final deliverables. Another important factor that seeks attention is the cost of the designing and marketing service. Choose a firm that offers affordable service and excellent quality in order to make the best out of your money!

1. Your online sales are dropping — Have you noticed a decline in online sales from your web leads as of late? If so, it might be time to hire a professional web design company that specializes in car dealer website design. If people are finding your site, but aren’t buying from you, it’s possible that your current design is driving them away. Perhaps it’s disorganized, outdated, or just plain ugly. Whatever the case, a carefully crafted website can be an integral part of boosting your sales. Web technology is advancing at a rapid pace and if you have a website that is even a couple years old, it’s to your advantage to have a new dealer website crated that will take full advantage of the newest technologies.
2. Your traffic decreases — If no one is finding your site, it’s possible that you need to overhaul your site to keep up with current search engine optimization practices. SEO practices are always changing, so while your site may have been optimized just fine a few years back, it might be time to start thinking about moving into the new decade. Your best bet would be to find a niche company that specializes in automotive SEO.
3. Your site loads slowly — Few things will piss off your potential car buyers like a slow loading site. In the age of super fast broadband Internet, people are used to lightning fast load times. And if they’re paying 40 dollars a month for high speed Internet, the last thing they want to do is sit and wait for your site to load. So they won’t. They’ll move on to the next car dealer site.
4. There’s no clear call to action — What do you want your buyers to do? Buy a car, right? Well research has proven time and again that customers need to be told what to do. And that’s buy. And buy now! If your site doesn’t have a clear call to action on every page, it’s time for a redo. No matter how well your dealer website is performing in search engines like Google, your not going to be realizing it’s full potential if your not converting the maximum number of your visitors into qualified dealer leads for your dealership.
5. You have a fancy flash intro — Flash looks really cool…to you. But to your customers, a flash intro is nothing more than an annoyance. And the truth is, you only have a few clicks on average to make a deal work. And if you have a flash intro, you’re wasting one of your clicks. So lose the fancy flash intro and opt for a redesign that looks sleek yet is informative and easy to navigate. With car dealer websites it’s important to recognize that simplicity is the goal. Making your site easy to navigate, loaded with calls to action, and yet simple is the way to increase your organic dealer leads from the web.
6. It reads like a robot wrote it — So you know what keywords you need in your content. And you, or your last automotive web designer, made sure that you included the relevant keywords every chance you got. It’ll get you found in Google, right? Well, yes and no. But that’s a different discussion for another time. Even if it increases your search ranking, what good does it do you when your potential buyers start reading your content and can barely understand it? See, when you overdo the keywords, it starts to seem like someone who isn’t very proficient in the English language wrote it. Sure your content needs the right keywords, but above all else, it needs to be friendly and easy to read.

Look, the markets tough and you need an edge. And overhauling your car dealer website is just what you need to advance your dealership in the new year.

*update 12/28/2010 - We have posted an updated video for 2011 using the TwentyTen theme on WordPress newer version. It is much more detailed and shows more info on how to properly integrate WordPress into any existing website you may have. View it here: http://www.websitedesign411.com/blog/integrate-wordpress-using-twentyten-2011/

After the popularity of our written tutorial on how to integrate WordPress into any existing website, we found that many people got confused or had a hard time following the written tutorial.

Often copying the code over from the written tutorial was cause for further issues.

WordPress is such a popular and powerful blogging platform that any website can benefit from implementing it. We have found that there is surprisingly little information available on how to easily accomplish this task. The average person is not a PHP guru and may need some assistance in pointing out what needs to be done in order to seamlessly integrate WordPress into their website.

In an effort to further aid the community in easily integrating WordPress into your existing website, we have now documented through a short video how to integrate WordPress into any existing website within 10 minutes!

Follow the step by step instructions in the video below and you can integrate WordPress into any existing website you may have. It doesn’t matter if it’s a CMS or straight HTML website!

If you read the written tutorial you can get an idea of what is needed in order to setup a placeholder blog that you can work from.

Also please remember to delete all the old code once your done working with the individual files. It is shown in all steps except the header.php file in the video. Before saving scroll down and delete all your old code you didn’t use!

You may want to take a peek at the written tutorial on how to integrate wordpress into your existing website before starting.

We hope you find this video useful and look forward to producing more useful tutorials for you in the future. Please don’t forget to leave feedback and link us to view your successful integrations!

If you have any suggestions on future tutorials you would like to see please drop us a line and give us your suggestions.

Now lets integrate WordPress into your site…

Many of our readers have requested that we provide a detailed write up of how to integrate a WordPress blog into any existing website. We are going to show you step by step how to get a working WordPress installation seamlessly integrated into your current website. It doesn’t matter if you are using Joomla, Drupal, or straight HTML, this write up will work for your website too!

Okay lets start by talking about some preparations you need to make. We need to make sure that you have installed WordPress on your host. For the purposes of this tutorial we will install WordPress under the /blog directory. So we are clear your WordPress installation should be found at www.yourwebsite.com/blog. This should be a standard WordPress install, nothing special is required from the installation standpoint.

Once you can see the default WordPress blog on your site at www.yourwebsite.com/blog, then we can begin the customization, excited yet?

First thing we want to do is log into the admin area and make sure you have the WordPress theme set to the default theme. Now pull down all the .PHP files we are going to edit from the host. Navigate through your favorite FTP program to the following location: /yourwebsite.com/blog/wp-content/themes/default/. From here you will want to move the following file to your desktop (or whichever folder you will use to house the files while you edit them):

• header.php
• index.php
• footer.php
• single.php
• comments.php

Now lets make sure you have a page setup on your site for the blog. This will be the “template” page you will use during your customization. If using HTML just make sure you have a page that you can actually visit for the blog at www.yoursite.com/blog. Leave the space where the blog content will go empty except for the text “blog content here”. Also make sure you have a space for your sidebar and write the text “sidebar here” so you can find it later as we edit the WordPress theme with this template. Below is a graphic example of what the blog “template” page could look like:

Now right click on your template page and view the source. From the view source page press Control+A to highlight all the text. Now press Control+C to copy the text. Open up a blank HTML file in your HTML/PHP editor (we will use Dreamweaver from now on for this tutorial). Go to the code page of your editor and delete everything so you have a blank canvass. Now press Control+V to paste the details of your template page into this new document.

EDIT THE HEADER.PHP FILE

1. Open up the header.php file in Dreamweaver. In the code you will want to delete everything after the initial

Use the screen shot below if your unsure:

2. Now go to your template you copied earlier and view the source. You should copy everything over exactly as it is. Start at the top and copy everything down to the area just before where your main body content for the blog will start. This will vary depending on your particular website layout, but it will work regardless. Once you have copied everything you consider to be the “header” from your template paste it into the header.php file. You can delete the title meta tag you copied from your template and replace with the the following one that you can find in the original header file:

In addition you can paste the following code from the original header.php code and place it in the meta area of your copied template code:

3. Since the blog is located in a sub directory we highly recommend making sure you input the full URL address to the files specified in all the meta tag info of your header.php file. For example

would become

Once you have done this for all the meta URL’s, you can save this file and transfer it to your host Copy over the header.php file in the default theme folder we discussed earlier.

EDIT THE INDEX.PHP FILE

1. Open the index.php file and delete everything after the inital PHP call for the header (leave that intact). Go back to your template code and copy EVERYTHING directly after the header area you copied ealier and UP TO the footer. Take this code and paste into the index.php file after the initial PHP header call. Now search your new index.php file and find the content filler text on your template that we suggest earlier. We used the text “blog content here”. Find that text and in it’s place paste the following code:

Good job your almost halfway done!

2. Now make sure you go to the very end of the code of the index.php file and paste the following code as the LAST LINE OF CODE for the index.php file:

3. The last thing you will have to do with the index.php file is find the filler text you used for your sidebar. Remember that we used the text “sidebar here”. Find that text and in it’s place past the following code:

you might have to place a div or paragraph tag around this one and center it or align it left or right depending on your taste.

EDIT THE FOOTER.PHP FILE

1. Open the footer.php file. You can delete everything AFTER the initial PHP call. Go back to your template and copy everything after your index text down to the last code on this page. Paste this code after the initial PHP call in the footer.php file. before the /body tag you will want to insert the following code:

if you would like to support WordPress or want to display the feed information in your footer you can paste the following code anywhere appropriate in your footer file (it’s not required to work so feel free to not include this if you don’t want to):

Okay now you have the basic blog customized to your website! you can overwrite the header.php, index.php and footer.php files in the default wordpress theme folder on your host. If you refresh the page you should see your working blog integrated with your site design! Great work, but not quite done yet…

EDIT SINGLE.PHP FILE

You want to copy everything from your new index.php into the single.php file. Highlight the WordPress code we told you to paste into the index.php file earlier and delete it. in it’s place replace it with this new code:

Keep the rest of the code in tact, you are only swapping out the main content code here. only replace the exact PHP code we told you to insert originally with this one. The last code should still be the call for the footer.php file as it is in the index.php file.

EDIT THE COMMENT.PHP FILE

Open the comment.php file and look for this line of code:

You will want to decrease the cols value to something lower than 100%. I suggest 75%-80% and see if that fits well with the site.

Now overwrite the single.php file and the comments.php file and go back and view an actual blog post on your site. It should look nice and pretty now.

At this point you have succesfully integrated a fully functional WordPress blog into your website. It now looks and functions exactly as the rest of your site does. You can go into your WordPress admin and install plugins and widgets to your hearts content!

if we missed anything or you have any other suggestions for future tutorials don’t hesistate to give us a suggestion! We welcome any feedback.

*12/02/2009 Edited the tutorial with code in the header.php that was causing a parse error. Also we highly recommend the use of SEO plugins to help with the meta tags once your blog is up and running. Happy blogging!

Content Management Systems (CMS) are nothing more than a set of files designed to assist in the creation, storage, and manipulation of website data. Web Content Management Systems (WCMS) are able to handle all types of internet files such as HTML, PHP, Flash, Java, and more.

CMS’s have evolved greatly over the last ten years. With today’s open source (free) content management systems it is possible for someone with limited knowledge of website programming to make a functioning website for their personal or business use.

In this article we will attempt to show the strengths and the weaknesses of the two most popular CMS systems that are freely available on the market today and what types of website should consider using them.

Joomla!

Joomla! has become one of the most widely used CMS systems for website designers, especially over the last three years. The Joomla project grew out of open source development of an older CMS platform known as Mambo. Joomla emerged in 2005 and has quickly become the top CMS platform and most downloaded for a variety many reasons. Below we will look at the top three reasons Joomla! has experienced such Worldwide success.

1. Out of the box functional website

Joomla is very easy to install and setup. Because of the module based nature of Joomla! and the fact that it is template driven, a website owner is literally able to setup a Joomla! installation and have a working website up in less than 30 minutes. The flexibility of Joomla is evident when one delves into customizing even the free templates that are integrated within the standard Joomla! installation. Because it is so easy to install and customize, Joomla! is a fully functional CMS that can be utilized by nearly any vertical market large or small.

Some of the most well known sites using Joomla! as their content management system today include big players such as:

• MTV Networks Quizilla (Social networking) – http://www.quizilla.com
• IHOP (Restaurant chain) – http://www.ihop.com
• Harvard University (Educational) – http://gsas.harvard.edu
• Citibank (Financial institution intranet) – Not publicly accessible
• The Green Maven (Eco-resources) – http://www.greenmaven.com
• Outdoor Photographer (Magazine) – http://www.outdoorphotographer.com
• PlayShakespeare.com (Cultural) – http://www.playshakespeare.com
• Senso Interiors (Furniture design) – http://www.sensointeriors.co.za

No matter how big or how small your website is going to be, it is wise for someone considering a CMS system to take a hard look at Joomla as your first choice. Once you begin to recognize the true power and flexibility of the Joomla! CMS platform it is very difficult to deny why it has become the top CMS platform in the world.

2. Ease of administration

Many people have very little knowledge of HTML, PHP, CSS, and other web based programming languages. This is why many website designers have begun to favor the Joomla! CMS platform. The front end administration of Joomla! is very well organized and simple to navigate. With one training call with your clients, a web designer is able to effectively show the website owner how to add, remove, and change content easily. As long as the user has some experience with Microsoft Word, they will have no problem at all using the Joomla administration panel to manage their websites.

This ease of use is what we rate the #2 best feature of the Joomla! CMS platform is for both web designers and end users.

Advanced programmers are still able to access the .PHP files directly and modify them in any way they see fit. This is why the Joomla! platform is also so popular with website designers.

3. Diverse community developed extensions

This final point should not be overlooked. There are thousands upon thousands of user developed free and commercial extensions for the Joomla! platform. Extension for Joomla! can be found for virtually any need one may have with a website. Extension range from things as small as adding Google tracking code to your site easily to as large as a complete community management system.

Joomla! extensions have been developed specifically to help many vertical markets needs such as realtors, car salesment, and most importantly e-commerce. As was uncovered in our last blog about Joomla! it’s even possible to buy an extension that integrates a WordPress blog into your Joomla! website installation.

Drawbacks To Joomla!

The biggest drawback we have found to date with Joomla is that it has not been able to truly integrate the power of other CMS systems such as Worpress into it’s existing website installation. We get around this by integrating WordPress manually into the Joomla! website, however many people find this too difficult to do on their own. For those people there is a pay extension available that integrates WordPress fairly well into Joomla!. It is not 100% complete integration, but it is good enough in most cases.

WordPress

WordPress is a system that has been around since 2001. Most people did not start actively using WordPress until 2005 with their version 1.5 release that introduced themes. In 2005 their 1.5 version was downloaded 900,000 times. In 2009 estimates put WordPress downloads well above 4 million!

WordPress has grown for a standard blogging platform into a fully functional content management system in it’s own right. Worpress.com is available to host blogs for those that want the absolute simplest method of blogging software. WordPress.org is where one can download the WordPress software that is needed to install on your host.

The top three reason for the success of WordPress include:

1. King of the blogging hill

WordPress is the undefeated, one of a kind, king of the hill blogging platform. WordPress simply has no equal when it comes to a powerful, SEO ready, scalable blogging system. With social media and social marketing becoming an ever increasing part of of every business’s marketing strategy, it is clear why WordPress has gained such a huge dominance in the marketplace for blogging software.

Because of the incredible community participation is the WordPress project, with the help of plugins and administrator customization, it’s quite possible for a website owner to create an entire site using nothing but the WordPress CMS platform for both static pages and dynamic blogging. As WordPress further develops it will surely gain even more footing over more popular CMS platforms such as Joomla! for complete website CMS .

2. diverse community developed plugins

The community has many free and pay commercial plugins that help to customize and extend the basic functionality of WordPress. Thanks to these unique plugins and other Worpress hacks, website owners are able to utilize WordPress installation as a one stop CMS for small and large website projects alike.

Some popular blogs you may not have known were powered by WordPress include:

• Anderson Cooper’s AC 360′s blog
• John Chow’s marketing blog
• Rosie Odonnell’s blog (ack….)

3. simple administration interface

Wodpress has bar none one of the most straightforward, no nonsense user interfaces of any CMS you will ever see. The WordPress administration is elegant and at the same time powerful. Without having any programming knowledge at all, a website designer’s client would likely be able to figure out how to navigate and blog using the WordPress administration panel easily.

The WordPress administration interface is one of those areas where a programmer can learn a valuable lesson. KEEP IT SIMPLE STUPID! Website owners with no knowledge of programming can very easily manipulate their way to blogging utopia using the simple administration of WordPress. There really isn’t much more to say then wonder at the simple glory of the WordPress administration interface people!

Drawbacks To WordPress

Okay so WordPress hasn’t exactly grown into a fully functional out of the box CMS platform for website development. Most website owners needing an in depth website platform will find themselves very frustrated with the limitations that WordPress has for them. The “out of the box” website is simply not there yet for WordPress.

User created hacks and plugins however greatly enhance the flexibility and scalability of WordPress as a full fledged content management system. For those not at least somewhat familiar with HTML or PHP, you may not be ready to try your hand at using WordPress as a one stop shop for your website development needs. WordPress is clearly on a path to becoming a full CMS platform and every year they are making leaps and bounds with the out of the box functionality of the WordPress platform.

There is no doubt that one day WordPress will rival Joomla!, Drupal, and other CMS platforms for dominance.

As it stands today website owners must evaluate the needs of their websites before deciding on a CMS platform to work from. At the highest level we recommend WordPress to anyone with a website that will be heavy on social media and blogging. Joomla! is often the first choice for static and dynamic scalable websites that may have special needs depending on your vertical market.

We welcome the insights and comments of others using these two powerful platforms and your thoughts on how to help others determine which platform is the right one for them.

We have been using Joomla! primarily for website developement because of the advantages it offers with regard to content display. The main problem we have run into is that it does not offer a robust blogging system that can come close to the speed, flexibility, and robustness of WordPress. To remedy the situation we have learned how to completely integrate WordPress into a Joomla! website installation so that you can get the best of both worlds!

Before getting into detail about how this is done it’s important to understand exactly what Joomla! and WordPress should are best at. For basic sites or Blogger only sites one may not even need to bother with Joomla! as WordPress has evolved into a fairly sophisticated CMS in it’s own right, however it still is not as complete in this regard as Joomla!

Joomla! is probably the best CMS (content management system) available to designers today. Because it is open source it has support from thousands of talented programmers that have added to the core functionality of Joomla! in what seems to be a never ending variety fo ways. Joomla! is a module based templated CMS platform. This is where it shines over WordPress as Content can be placed in any of the preset module positions that are designed for both static and dynamic content. There are many pre-made templates available for free that allow unbelievable flexibility in the way that content can be displayed through your web portal.

Additional functionality such as community management, message boards, ecommerce, rating systems, twitter interations, facebook integrations, etc.. are all very simple upgrades for a Joomla! installation. Once one fully understands the incredible power of the CMS platform, the ease with which it is manipulated and added to is incredible. Designers are free to make custom templates and easily port WordPress or basic HTML websites into Joomla! templates. All of these features mentioned are free to anyone with the time and the talent to learn how to master Joomla!

Joomla!, for all it’s great flexibility still has some shortcomings. One of the most obvious shortcomings is it’s inability to produce a serious blogging platform that would rival WordPress. There are several plugins available that try to provide blogging integration for Joomla, but the only one that even attempts to rival WordPress is still in beta and is not free.

WordPress has long been known to be the king of blogging software. Many people today use WordPress to manage their entire website. WordPress is complete capable of being used in this way. In the future we expect that WordPress will be developed to rival Joomla! in it’s ability to be used as a complete and fully functional CMS. For the time being WordPress is limited in it’s ability to fully function as a dynamic web portal in the way that Joomla! is. Today one can setup a complete website designed using wordpress software complete with static web pages and Blogging functionality, even ecommerce and more. WordPress is faster and more lightweight that Joomla! which is always a plus for a web design. When it comes to a fully functional Blogging system there is no match… WordPress is king.

If you are looking to build yourself a small site or one that is geared specifically toward being a Blog, then this article may not be for you since a pure WordPress installation will be just fine for your needs. If you require the full functionality of Joomla! for your website deign, but still want to have the power of WordPress Bloggings software integrated into your website design… then please read on!

The best part of both Joomla! and WordPress is that they are both free open source software. Anyone with the skills to master the software can design stunning websites completely free of charge. This is why both of these softwares are so popular around the world today.

There are many plugins that will provide blogging features for a Joomla! website, but some people require more!

In order to install WordPress onto a Joomla! installation we recommend installing the software into a subdirectory such as yourwebsite.com/blog. This will ensure that none of your Joomla! files will be conflicting with the WordPress files.

Once the WordPress files are complety installed simply continue to setup the WordPress installation as you would any normal WordPress install.

Now you will have access to the WordPress blog by visiting your blog URL at mywebsite.com/blog. You can customize the WordPress template through your admin section of your WordPress installation. Customizing the WordPress installation to match your Joomla! website may be the most challenging part for people that are not well versed in PHP code and website design. You may need the assistance of a professional in order to exactly match the WordPress template to your Joomla! website template. For an experiened website designer however, this will only take a short while to complete. If you need assistance with this please contact us. We will write a tutorial on how to completely customize the default WordPress template to match ANY Joomla! template in the near future. In the meantime please contact us directly if you need asssistance.

Once the WordPress installation has been made to look like the rest of your website (by modifying the header.php,index.php,footer.php,single.php, and comments.php files in the WordPress themes folder) you simply have to link the mywebsite.com/blog URL as an external link in your Joomla! menu.

Now you have the best of both worlds. A Joomla! website that is completely integrated with a powerful WordPress blog.

You can customize the WordPress blog with your favorite widgets and plugins just as you would any other WordPress installation. We highly recommend submitting a second Sitemap to Google Webmaster tools for your Blog since you will already have one for your main Joomla! website content.

Sit back and start enjoying the benefits of a well optimized website and powerful Blogging software which will help you in your efforts of dominating your market!

Example Joomla/Wordpress Blog Integrations:

• http://www.burnseo.com/blog
• http://fivestarsmortgage.com/blog
• http://www.nfmmortgage.com/blog
• http://www.harddmoneyloans.com/blog