rightcaravan4u.co.uk - Used Caravan sales site
The marketing agency I work for have just launched a used caravan sales website, which is the biggest project I’ve worked on to date for the agency.
The project has given me a chance to really try some new techniques out such as developing the whole system architecture using the
The other benefit of CruiseControl.Net was that we could use it to build directly to our live server once we had a build everyone was happy with. This has saved us an awful amount of time as the live server has required very little faffing around with. When it has come to bug fixing etc, this has meant we simply fix the bug, build to the test server, test and then build to the live server (if everyone is happy with the fix). It’s just a continuous flow of development and it’s so simple!
Overall Design
The website itself was split into three main sections:
- The Public facing site
- The Dealer Administration tool
- The Agency Administration tool
The public site
The majority of the public site is driven by web services. The reason for this was so that dealers and other interested parties could then pull the data from out databases fairly easily. Sure we could have written the web services later, but it seemed sensible to use them for the front end site, thus testing them in the process.
The site allows visitors to search for used caravans by postcode along with some other filters and then view more details of each caravan returned from the search. The postcode functionality comes from Google as discussed in a previous article.
For those visitors who are very loyal they can search through the caravan dealers page to look at stock from just certain dealers.
Caravan Dealers add their own stock
Currently the site has over 30 dealerships (that’s about 40 branches) signed up so the system. The site is currently only open to Swift dealers. They can manage the stock on the site via a web-based admin tool. The tool allows them to add / edit / delete stock items. For the more technically inclined dealers they can import and export their stock in either the CSV or XML format.
There are number of rules a dealer must follow to publish a used caravan onto the rightcaravan4u.co.uk website. One of these rules includes having to upload at least one picture of the caravan onto the site.
The file upload functionality allows dealers to upload a picture from their computer (probably from a digital camera). The system then automatically compresses the file to a smaller jpeg (small in both of file size and dimensions) and it also generates a thumbnail as well. The images are then stored onto our live server. This was done as it was decided that some dealers would not have the technology to compress files.
So far the feedback from the caravan dealers has been very positive. The agency has fielded very few support emails and phone calls and more and more stock is being uploaded each day.
How to market a used caravan site
Currently the agency is marketing the site through Google Adwords. Although this is quite costly the site is average over 200 visitors a day in the first 5 days. There is clearly a market for a “used caravans for sale” website. It is hoped that the marketing spend on Adwords will be reduced as the site gets indexed by the search engines and performs well in their listings.
We have also asked all the caravan dealers who have signed up to the system to link from their website to the rightcaravan4u.co.uk website. As the search engines stumble across more and more of these links hopefully that will help improve out positioning. The agency have specified how they want the link to appear on each site as it is hoped the markup will improve the link performance.
In the new year the agency will start advertising the site in the relevant caravan magazines, so it is hoped that awareness of the site will increase gradually, thus giving time for the dealers to add more and more stock onto the system.
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