Cars Ireland

Mediahuis (formerly known as Independent News and Media) is an international company that owns and operates a wide selection of media brands across all disciplines. Their coverage is 24/7 as their ownership and cultivation of media brands reach a wide audience in multiple time zones. They are also the proud owners of Cars Ireland, an online platform that includes 900+ car dealerships specialising in second hand cars. 

Cars Ireland required a high performing, customer focused user experience platform built to make the most of their extensive dealer api services and to meet the requirements of their extensive dealer network. We are proud to be working with Cars Ireland to deliver this all new Generation 4 platform. This new platform provides the dealers with premium mobile first designs, customer focused user experience and the fast load times their customers expect.  These are cost effective premium solutions that have minimal to no reliance on third party plugins and services.

Customer Focused User Experience (UX)

With a high number of websites, there needed to be a sense of differentiation all the while maintaining a standard of high performance. Gen4 is a series of premium car dealer website templates, 2 of which are complete (Eclipse and Apocalypse) and are based on a Mobile First Design. We’ll take the Micheal Barrable Motors website as an example of just one of the templates that Powwow Technologies is developing. Drop Down components are put in place so customers can refine the search and find a car that is attractive to them, there are brief descriptions of the cars and if the customer wants to know more than they can click on the full car detail page. The experience is more meaningful to the customer if they do not have to see information that does not apply to them or interests them. If they have any other concerns widgets are put in place to direct them to mobile, messenger, or social media channels. 

  • Detailed car search results
  • Full car details page widgets
  • Featured Cars widget
  • Location widget
  • Contact widget
  • Finance Calculator Widget
  • GDPR compliant forms
  • Group dealer search tools
  • Social media tools

Customers’ wants and needs are changing, they expect most of the tools listed above in order to have a meaningful experience that will keep them coming back for more. Offering a high level of functionality that will change with the times is key, every customer will have a different need so it is important to offer the best selection of tools possible. Staying ahead of the competition and customer expectations is possible with fast development and an eye for new and emerging tools to enhance your customers experience.

Mobile First Development

The emphasis comes from data, more customers are using their phones to browse the selection of cars instead of their desktop. Therefore, it is important to create a pleasant and meaningful experience for mobile users as they are the bulk of customers who come to Cars Ireland.  

Built from scratch, it was built on the WordPress via Bedrock framework as regular WordPress can be a bit restrictive in terms of professional development. Maintaining backward compatibility can be difficult when using standard WordPress, so using Bedrock was the best solution going forward. Websites that lack a focus on mobile development can only be reached on specific mobile devices, which can hurt their rankings in the long term. 

The ease and convenience of sharing business information from anywhere and the ease at which customers can access this data is getting easier. The only problem is that the competition thinks the same way, so differentiation with a superior website is important to rank higher on search engines and generate word of mouth (WOM).

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a must and developing a site that runs well on desktop and mobile, which ultimately ends up with a greater number of leads generated. Getting onto the first page of a search engine is a major goal, as many customers do not go beyond it in their search. 

Making sure the site is keyword rich is important, as matching the customers search intentions is one of the most important steps in ranking high and yielding good traffic results on any website. User Experience (UX) is also key in achieving domain authority such as  fast loading times and functionality that will yield positive results and build a stronger bond with customers. 

Organic traffic and a high level of click through rates (CTR) are increased by the User Design (UD) where customers take action and want to learn more and this is where presentation plays a crucial role. Providing a well thought out customer journey with ample opportunities to place CTAs (call to actions) in your customer’s eyeline as well as some conditional logic is a good starting point for customer retention and organic search results.

Fast Load TImes

The response time is sub 1 second, speed is key as it makes the experience as smooth as possible for the customer. If they experience long load times or any difficulty along the buying process it can have negative effects, even a subsconscious brand association if the UX is not up to a high standard. 

The code has been minified, meaning that all the unnecessary characters have been removed from the source code and results in reduced file-size. This makes for a fast experience without an overall effect on functionality. Deleting unnecessary 3rd party scripts is also a way to speed up your website, Powwow Technologies looked to minimize the reliance and contact with third party extensions to do this. 

A custom developed data cache layer (made possible by a proprietary Powwow Technologies Application Cache Layer) accessed via custom API endpoints and delivered directly to the UI. This is a very effective solution that does not rely on access to a database and is not slowed down by read/write database delays. 

Lazy loading images are also a key factor in the performance of the website, the images are not preloaded like other websites, they only load as the customer looks at them and not a moment before.

Security

Protected by end-to-end encryption and the same level of security that WordPress has (mius having to stick to their rules when developing. A client nonce (number once) is a random number that can be used once in a cryptographic communication, this protects the client from the server itself and negates replays; it is a tried and true method that blocks old communications. 

API class request annotations result in the code being more accurate, with less code that is really not needed. It also uses decorators to enforce expected request parameters; if a programmer wants to change the behavior of a certain piece of code then they will usually wrap it in a decorator to change its behavior.