A BIG CONGRATS to Alex Snyder and CheckeredFlag.com!

Congrats Alex!
Months and months of planning pays off! I can't wait to see what you have planned for the new Inventory display.

Long live the LONG TAIL!!
Joe

Congratulations King Alex!

Yet another reason I try to keep my picture off the Internet, nice job Jeff!

Well deserved Alex!

and he refers to Jeff as the rockstar?

I am truly amazed! I may have changed my mind regarding Dealer.com. Well made, and well maintained! Good Job Alex!

Tony Weaver

Thanks everyone. I'm not sure whether I should shake Jeff's hand or punch him - lol. I'll keep my photo up there until the YouTube video comes out.

You're right Jeff - most of the dealer awards for online stuff is extremely inconsistent, but this particular award is something I'm quite proud of.

Who voted for these? This looks like another example of whatever company pays the magazine the most money. Some of these sites look terrible.

C'mon, 3 clicks before you get to see a car for sale? Huh? Granted, there's a lot to look at on the home page, but if I just want to buy a car you need to have specials on the first page.

Gregg,

I assume you're talking about Checkered Flag.com, so....

Everybody has their own personality, and that is reflected in their site. I'm not sure you looked very closely at our site. If you did, then you certainly missed the specials that are smack-dab in your face as soon as you hit the homepage. You probably also missed the ability to do a quick search (happens to be next to that slideshow of specials you missed) that will take you straight into the inventory. You might have also missed those navigation tabs at the top that will at least get you into new, used, or less expensive vehicles. You may have also noticed with the brands we carry, we're dealing with a wide range of customers and personality types.

Half our traffic is for a car purchase and the other half is for Fixed Operations. Why should I alienate 50% of our customers to show them nothing but inventory on our homepage? And speaking of a site like that, how about yours? You've definitely got inventory up there, but there is so much it takes forever to load (I'm not saying ours is a speed-demon either) - in fact, I never could get your site to completely load on my first 4 refreshes. What if I wanted to know more about your dealerships? What if I wanted to service my car, buy parts, or get back to your homepage.....hold-on a second. I'm completely wrong - I just looked at your site again. You do have links to the other parts of your store. Your navigation bar loads after all your inventory shows up. It only took 3.47 minutes for it to appear (according to my Firefox load timer). Okay, I apologize - you do have things there. Next time, I'll wait a few minutes for the whole site to load before I bring my car in for service - not a problem! I'm sure it loads faster once things are cached.

If you wish to continue your criticism, my next response will relate to site traffic and other things of that nature.

Gregg wrote:

"C'mon, 3 clicks before you get to see a car for sale? Huh?"

As Alex put it, you are entitled to your opinion. Many of us were taught that each click through results in a higher potential click off probability. I have preached that many times myself and had documented proof to back it up.

That said, in my opinion, Alex's site is innovative. Our goal should be to make sure that unique and repeat visitors spend some time on our sites. In fact, I would venture a guess that his site has one of the higher time spent per session than most of us.

By using blogs and customer profiles he is not only making for good reading, but also creating a relationship with buyers and non-buyers a like. It is personal, refreshing and doesn't scream I WANT TO SELL YOU A VEHICLE!

Instead, it caters to what most Internet shoppers want; information. Instead of going to 4-5 different sources, they can get it all from one.

Screw the click through theory. Nice work and a well deserved award!