Defining the Best Car Dealer Website: A Comprehensive Guide

It is crucial to have objectivity when assessing website quality. You should approach the following areas through the lens of your target customer:

• Aesthetics: Does the website portray the correct, professional image of the brand it represents?
• Content Quality: Is the vehicle data, website copy, and imagery accurate, unique, and highly valuable to the consumer?
• Navigability: How intuitive is the user journey? Can a user find a specific used car or book a service in under three clicks?
• Design: Is the website presented in a way that fulfils its purpose flawlessly across all device types (desktop, tablet, mobile)?
• Functionality: Does the website utilise modern technology to provide interactive features, such as accurate finance calculators or online reservation systems?
• Visibility: Is the website highly visible on search engines and AI answer engines when users search for relevant local terms?
• Reliability: Does the website load quickly and work consistently without errors?

How Important is mobile-first design in Automotive?

The fact that this question is asked so frequently is a consequence of the term's overuse in describing certain approaches to automotive website design. In this section, we will describe some common website design techniques, including mobile-first, so that dealerships can determine whether a design they are being offered follows a mobile-first approach or a different approach, as well as determine which approach might work best for them. Some popular approaches are broken down here:

Responsive website design

This approach uses fluid grid systems and flexible images to ensure that a website's layout adjusts smoothly to different screen sizes. The design is based on breakpoints that dictate how the layout will change as the screen size changes. Responsive design is popular because it is relatively easy to implement and ensures that the website looks good on any device.

Mobile-first design

This approach involves designing a website specifically for mobile devices first and then scaling up to desktop sizes. This approach ensures that the website is optimised for the smallest screens, which is important given the increasing number of users who access websites from mobile devices.

Adaptive website design

This approach uses predefined layout templates that are designed to fit specific screen sizes. Adaptive design can be more complex than responsive design, as it requires multiple templates to be created for different screen sizes. However, it can provide a more tailored experience for users on specific devices.

Dynamic serving

This approach involves serving different HTML and CSS depending on the device that is accessing the website. The server detects the device and serves the appropriate code. This approach can provide a highly tailored experience for users on different devices, but it can be complex to implement.

RESS

RESS (Responsive Web Design with Server-Side Components) is an approach that uses a combination of client-side and server-side components to optimise the website for different devices. The server detects the device and serves optimised HTML and CSS, which can improve the website's performance on slower devices.

Progressive Web Apps

This approach involves designing a website that looks and feels like a native app on a mobile device. Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are designed to be fast, reliable, and engaging, and they can work offline, which is useful for users with poor internet connectivity.

Approach Used by Autoweb Design

At Autoweb Design, we have the capability to deliver website builds using any of the aforementioned approaches. We do not adopt a one-size-fits-all approach. In cases where speed of delivery and cost control are paramount, we often adopt a hybrid approach which combines elements of responsive and adaptive design to create a website that is optimised for different devices while also providing a tailored experience for specific screen sizes. This means that the website covers all benefits of mobile-first design but does not necessarily have a completely different page template file for every page on every device. It also means that the websites are generally better optimised for tablets and desktop/laptop devices than a mobile-first website which is essentially a version of responsive design but not starting with a mobile design rather than a desktop design.

As the type of website build increases in complexity, we will adopt approaches including those above as it best works for the process, but these would be a form of adaptive design as a minimum, never a simple mobile-first or responsive approach.

The Problem with Mobile-First Design in Automotive

There is a widespread misconception amongst automotive retailers about what mobile-first design is. There are three common beliefs that are not strictly correct:

1. That Mobile-First is the cutting-edge approach adopted by well-known, modern websites
2. That Mobile-First is more complex than traditional responsive design
3. That a mobile-first website is identified by its usability on mobile 

Mobile First Design simply means that someone started the design of the website on the smallest screen, then scaled up using responsive technologies so that elements on the page resize. If this had been done, then you would see a difference in the way the page was designed previously, in a responsive design vs how it is in a mobile-first, and the reasons for those changes should be clear. This is not simple to identify as it is only a designer's attempt at a mobile design. If you start from a design that isn't fully optimised for mobile, there is virtually no difference between a mobile-first and a responsive website designed for desktop.

With this in mind, we suggest that dealerships explore the design approaches, their relative costs both in terms of time and investment and the benefits of each. At Autoweb Design, standard offerings follow a hybrid adaptive approach as a minimum, which is a significant step up in terms of performance for dealerships vs a 'mobile-first' design. 

A Quick Summary of Approaches and General Costs

All of these approaches mentioned aim to create a website that is optimised for different devices and screen sizes. The choice of approach will depend on factors such as the website's goals, audience, and budget.

Bespoke Website Design vs Templated Websites

By bespoke website design, we mean a website that goes through its own design process involving the steps below.

Step 1. Create Information Architecture (Plan of Pages that will exist)
Step 2. Create Wireframes/Prototypes (Layouts of the pages without final styling)
Step 3. Create Styles and visual design features

A Templated website is one where the page templates are pre-built and then populated with content (text/media) and usually include a setting for theme colour/font.

Templated websites are the fastest and lowest cost method of deploying a car dealer website because the build process is already done, and any changes are done via a content management system (CMS). There are fewer decisions to make or time to spend working out how to optimise your website. For small dealerships or new dealerships who don't have a lot of user behaviour data, this is a great way to go as long as you choose a template that is at least in-part adaptive in its approach, not a basic responsive or mobile-first template. This is because you then know that it has been properly optimised for the things that have been described in this article.

A bespoke website design is not the same as a bespoke website build which typically involves a single code base for a website with all components built from a blank page and coded from scratch. There are many drawbacks to an approach like this, and it is seldom used, as explained in our article on website platforms and CMS.

Costs of Different Bespoke Website Design Approaches

A good way to think about the expense required for a website design process is by considering the complexity and number of different page base template files that need to be created to deliver the design.

For example, in a responsive website, you might have a single page base template for each type of page on the website, which is then used to build the page for all devices in one go-through configuration. In an adaptive approach using dynamic serving, you would require multiple files for each page type so a tailored page can be delivered across different devices.

This is an over-simplification, and the number of files is not always directly dictated by the approach, but the number of ways that the code must generate pages is so the analogy works.
In order of complexity (and therefore cost, provided you are being offered value-for-money)

Lowest Cost & Fastest Delivery: Responsive or Mobile-First Design - One design that is resized for different screens

Medium Cost: Adaptive Hybrid approaches that tailor key parts of the site, such as conversion pages for each device type.

Highest Cost & Longest Execution Time: Complex adaptive designs involving RESS or dynamic serving in unique ways.

So - What Defines the Best Car Dealer Website Out There?

In our opinion, the following would apply to the best car dealership website out there right now. Who's that is will constantly change, but we hope that this article will enable automotive retailers to better scrutinise proposed websites beyond surface-level gimmicks to raise the bar for website performance, which is good for the dealerships who will see improvements in ROI and consumers who will have a better buying experience.

Our List

• Aesthetics: There is a consistent look and feel and visual hierarchy. It has visual interest but in a consistent way throughout the site. The styles are a proper reflection of the brand, and the colour scheme is well-thought-through.
• Content Quality: The content tells users about insights that the dealership has, based on its brands, stock profile, services and location(s). The content is unique, well written and not written for
• SEO but for website visitors. Any media is of high quality.
• Navigability: Navigation is easy to read and intuitive so that you can get to where you want to quickly
• Design: As a minimum, it has adaptive elements built into it, presenting itself in a tailored way on different devices to ensure users experience everything listed in this section, no matter what device they are using.
• Functionality: The website uses useful technology such as integrations to enhance the customer experience, making full use of open architectures.
• Visibility: The website appears highly in search engine results (including Google and Bing) for the keywords and locations that are relevant to its business.
• Reliability: The website is built on robust architecture with a codebase that is maintained and ideally not only used for the single website. It should be compatible with all in-life browsers.
• Performance: The website should convert at a high rate across all devices, consistently both in terms of calls and online form fills.
• Integration: The website should integrate with all systems that produce data that can be optimised. This should include a custom web analytics setup to enable post-launch optimisation and continual improvement.