I am seeking comments about the new version of the website for Addison Auto Center.
Comments related to:
design
navigation
SEO
coding

New site = Addison Auto Repair & Body Shop in Denver for 26 years

Old site = Addison Auto Center: Service, Repair, Body & Paint in Denver for 26 years

Note: the only page in the new site that is complete is Automatic Transmission Service

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Dave Barnes
+1.303.744.9024
http://www.marketingtactics.com
sitting in my basement with my iMac

I did not look at the old site. Sites like this are basically for local traffic, the chances are that visitors already know who you are and what you do. I always like a response from a visitor, In the case of this site the response would probably not come until that drastic day when a driver backs into you beloved car.

I think I would like to offer visitors something like a free bumper sticker (only available from the web page) that says something like - "Do not tow me unless - And a humorous plug for Addison's" - just something to offer.
Something for visitors to gain - An Addison's key ring, with a message. "I am a virgin, Even Addison's never touched my body" - just a bit of marketing to go with the website.



Dave you have been a design critic for a long time - I saw the blank response to your post and wondered if you scared a few useful comments
away.


P.S. Dave, are you the only member that had your MVP ensign restored? There were a few MVP's do we only have one now? or is there a slow recovery from the 'reputation' changes. I think more MVP's should be returned.

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Tubby,

I have no idea.
I was just a regular participant and then one day I was a MVP.
Did not ask for it, did not not even know what it was. It was, poof, and it was there.

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Dave Barnes
+1.303.744.9024
http://www.marketingtactics.com
sitting in my basement with my iMac

Local, yes.
Know who they are, no.
Greater Denver is 1.5M people.
Addison Auto is trying attract (snare) new customers who are searching the web and not using the paper Yellow Pages, etc.

I appreciate your comments, but can you answer any of my questions? That is, can you tell me how the new Addison Auto site sucks?

__________________
Dave Barnes
+1.303.744.9024
http://www.marketingtactics.com
sitting in my basement with my iMac

Hi Dave,

You ever notice our offices are less than six miles apart?

Like Tubby said, you've been doing these freebie reviews forever, and I'm sure there are hundreds of web sites improved based on your efforts, so I will try to weakly return the favor... been a rough and busy couple of weeks here lately, apologies for what will be some rambling at 3am.

Design

Top image is rather large, 120k, and the logo text gets smashed into a mountain at the end - white glow there perhaps? Could move the logo left enough to "get out of the woods" if it's a layered image, there's room. Something else, not sure if applicable here, a mechanic I worked with a while back noted a shiny new model vehicle (your Burgundy Jeep) was easy on the eyes, but he felt it made his shop appear to be either a car dealer or implied he worked on newer models, whereas he made most of his revenue from "out of warranty" older vehicles, 5-8+ years off the lot. And even more if they didn't have those [insert mechanic swearing] computers controlling [insert more mechanic swearing]. Something to consider?

Layout is good. Gray header bars is mildly dreary and blends too much into the dropdowns (which have a lot of good stuff in them... if you can convince the mouse to go that way). Text in these gray areas could use a revisit, "Quick Info" replaced with "Contact Info" might help both users and localization. "Signup for our Newsletter" presumably is incomplete, since you cannot at the moment. But the title could be more inviting... "We'll Keep You Informed" or "Let Us Remind You..." - along those lines? I'd lay out a few keyword-rich "previous issues" there to let people know what they're in for if they sign up, guess is that a newsletter is a powerful way to bring people in for oil changes and more if the back end is handled well. "Trustworthiness" seems awkward for both SEO and to read; lots of ways to say different things, but "Your Trusted Mechanic and Vehicle Repair Center" would be one.

"Longevity" sounds more holistic health industry, how about "Reliability" or since you have quite a bit of room there, "Repairing Your Vehicle for Over 27 Years!" - which is not quite right but you get the idea. The forest green vehicle (nice red calipers) offers a place to brighten the home page, and like the logo note, some sort of contrasting glow or shadow would help accentuate the lettering, words get lost in the spokes right now. "Qualified" has the same potential for expansion, and even the brief "Qualified Mechanics" would hit a key term.

Friendly, Modern, Clean. That's important. Possibly (since you give visitors the address, phone, and map left-side) more important than the Convenient Location. Just possibly more important than "Longevity" since you've got the legitimacy down in multiple places. Busy, nicely-dressed people, many with kids, don't want to walk into a grease pit. Maybe they want to read in that section about the free shuttle and rental possibilities offered (though it is in the nav, it is lost there).

Speaking of lost in nav, what should a customer bring in? Foreign, domestic? New, old? Performance, brake, tranny, engine? At risk of making the page too busy, there's room on the left to have short bullets of key service offerings. Oil Change, Inspection, Emissions, Scheduled Tune-Up, etc. (This is mostly implied or said flatly in the dropdown nav, but you know people make very quick first impressions before giving you their time). I'd go even more specific in that "Qualified" area and go for precision, there's a couple too many "all areas, modern tools, many industry sources, help our technicians repair most vehicle models" statements that add up to me not knowing if a [insert visitor vehicle] is welcome and will be in hands experienced with that precise make and model.

Not sure "legitimacy" falls into design, but mentioning it here, mostly because it's very well done on this site. Home page has the top-center piece, all pages have right-side logo set (and testimonials on drill pages on the left), the logos link where they should, and there's enough white space it says something as opposed to getting the usual "smack it in the footer" treatment. Price, proximity, general service types, and legitimacy are probably the only differentiators of note for the thousand mechanical shops in Denver, and you've squarely hit the only one you can influence as a designer. Only concern I have actually points more to SEO, which is that the Javascript array puts a lot of characters in front of your content (the JS rotating testimonials).

Call to action. Their old site is rotten to be sure, but the phone number is big and bold. If they want one thing from this site, it's probably to generate a phone call. Might be worth turning that mountain into a Hollywood sign. It may also be worth an annoying eye-catcher that says something to the effect of "Need Help Now?" and a hotline-style phone number. If you're car's on the side of the road and you called your wife on her cell and she typed in something that got her to this page, will you catch her eye in two seconds?

Navigation

Once you hook the visitor, the nav is very good. This presumes that they recognize these are dropdowns, though, and down arrows might be worth a thought. Most small mechanic shops have very basic navigation and only a few key pages, so visitors may not recognize the dropdowns as anything but go-somewhere single links.

Links are mostly "hard to tell from black" in current dark blue, with no underlining. Not sure you would want things underlined all over, but a higher contrast may help, and to reduce the "lines everywhere!" chaos mousing slowly up the home page, instead of underlining could change color and remain underline-free for non-essential links.

SEO

Going with the one complete page, you're writing is maybe one notch above where it should be for SEO purposes in terms of copy/content; e.g. "oxidation" is in there six times by a quick count. And while technically, sure, it's an oil, ATF or "transmission fluid" seem more on-topic and less ambiguous for confused spiders. I don't have to ask my wife to know you'd lose her in paragraph one with talks of temperatures and towing trailers.

As a general thought, one thing people want to do is "find" or "where" and "what do I do" in terms of searching for mechanic and automotive work. I don't have hard data, but "where can I find a mechanic for my transmission" or "how do I know if my transmission needs serviced" sounds like low-volume but high conversion phrases (provided nearby location). It's not too jarring to sneak this into a secondary H2 or just bold-text "question" in pages like this. Yeah, we've rocked our vehicles back and forth a few times in Denver... but would we search for that? "Will it hurt my transmission to drive in snow?" seems like a higher search and conversion phrase.

On all pages, I'd consider adding either or both "South Denver" and "Aurora" to the bottom gray-text list, might also add "mechanic" to that sentence (changing it on a per-page basis e.g. "transmission repair" and give that area some white space; it's visible so may as well make it look wholly on purpose, nobody but an SEO sort is going to sniff and mumble "stuffer!" at that line.

Hard to gauge SEO from two pages, and Title tags are tricky, but words like fix, repair, mechanic seem like good possible additions to a page titled "Automatic Transmission Service" - if the client gives you the budget and time to test, "Repair My Automatic Transmission" might be a worthy contender.

Here's the Home Page (description answers some questions I posed about specialization, but as you know most people will gloss over SE results and of course nobody is dumb enough to view source... err... minus one.

HomeTitle: Addison Auto Repair & Body Shop in Denver for 26 years
HomeDescription: Addison Auto Repair and Body Shop is AAA Approved for auto service, maintenance, body and paint in Denver. All makes but specialize in Saab, Volvo, Subaru.

Only comment on title is the word "mechanic" is not there and "for 26 years" is nice visually in a SE result, but might be cut off, either way I'd cut it since again you cover legitimacy thoroughly on-page.

Description repeats half the title, which makes some sense here, but might rework this to use variations on key words and add some others (whatever brings in the bacon) like "dent" or "hail damage" - nothing a body shop likes more than a blank check from an insurance company to suck out a couple of hail bumps.

Coding

Previously noted JS array. Not sure it's "bad" but less sure it's good. Rather like SEO, mashed a bit of this into the first two sections...

Thanks Dave and hope this helps, you're an MVP for a reason.

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Denver SEO, Blog, and Web Design Consultants

Hi Dave.

The overall layout and design I thought was far better on the new site over the old, but what stood out to me on the new site was the top header. The images in it look like clip art and the mountains look pasted in with the Jeep pasted on top, like a cartoon drawing to where every image has a defined black outline, where a photo does not. The header image flows into the page background color on the left side "it is the same color as the background where on the right it is not". This makes the top image look unbalanced. Lastly the word "shop" in the logo on the left side of the header image blends into the mountains making it hard to read.

The gray nav bar color fits the "repair shop" theme, but yes it looks a tad bit dreary and the blue hover color is a little bright on the gray.

Lastly looking at your 'automatic transmission' page, I tried to look at this page from a customer in need point of view. To make the scenario, let's say a customer has a car, truck, SUV, boat, tank, what have you, transmission that is starting to slip or grind or is suspicious of going bad. I find your site. I follow your link of what you work on to transmissions, and click on that link and come to your automatic transmissions page where I am immediately let down. The page only talks about why I should change my transmission oil. It does not go in to what type of transmissions you work on, on what type of vehicles do you do, do you only work on automatic transmissions, what about standard transmissions and trans-axles. I mention in my scenario cars, trucks, SUV's. All three of them have different sizes and different types of transmissions. Do you repair them? And not to beat a dead horse, but do you work on Semi's? From a customer in needs' point of view, I would leave your site.

Also on your transmission page I would add some sort of call to action button along the lines of 'click here to set up an appointment for a free diagnostic', or some other sort of call to action.

Thoughts:
I tried to view the new page without looking at the old page. This was spoiled when I hit the home button on the new page and it took me to the old site. While I was on the old site one thing that stood out were the images of the inside of the repair shop. The images stood out because the repair shop was clean, neat, orderly, etc., a place where I would not mind taking my $50k + vehicle to. I know your page is not done. I hope you add some images like this to your new page.

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The Sensual Touch Lingerie | High Heels | High Heel Blog

In a certain way, the old site was (almost) better.

There's no credibility, or strategically coherent copy. Graphics are attractive, but pointless.

Only on the web would you go through choosing graphics for a site, without understanding what users want from graphics. A collision repair outfit without Before/After pictures ...everywhere ....are you kidding me?!

Show how good you are, with dramatic before and after pics, don't just do "name, rank and serial number." It's not a game of figuring out what the absolute least information possible you can get away with.

Is the car in the header stock photography or a client? How do you suppose the visitor can tell, in no uncertain terms, what level of expertise you have from viewing the "after" without the "before" for context. Let's say the car in the header was a client. The viewer has no context to know whether you buffed out a scuff mark or fixed a total wreck. It's as though the design ignores users completely.

Take a page like Collision Repair Process and turn it into well thought out visual runthrough. If your employees are worth mentioning, explain why and use a photo of them, with name, as well. Make employees more like real people than two dimensional stock photography props.

And explain something about what you do that makes it seem you've got expertise in collision repair. Right now this sounds like a template site -- with a map and logo added. It sounds as though you apply this site content to every single competitor. Articulate a Unique Selling Proposition, vividly illustrated with graphics. And try taking pictures of customers, with their car (before/after) and a Full Name with the testimonials.

If you're going to have a newsletter, detail why the user should sign up. Make it obviously valuable enough to want to get. Give some hint it's not the obligatory excuse to get an email address.

The site is fairly uninformative, typical generic brochureware -- new version, old version. It's hard to tell what the business objective was for this. Check out this car wash. This actually walks through the process, using photos to go along with text and illustrate key points. Most sites so separate graphics from text, a schism take place. The photos become generic decoration with little relevance to the text.

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Design Crux - infographic design,
content strategy Visual Merchandising online

Hi Dave,

Glutton for punishment, huh?

I only have a few points to make as most fokls have written war and peace on this.

Firstly new design is wayyyyy better than old. It is crisp and modern looking. However, i agree that top image (apart from being on the beefy side) doesn't really reflect the business.

The navigation, whilst really cool if you like complicated JavaScript - not really good for SEO. You could do this in CSS and it would be fully spiderable. However, I think that it might be too much for this site. Try Good ol' Stu Nichols for off the shelf CSS drop downs.
Stu Nicholls | CSSplay | CSS only menus.

On new home page, Title is not capitalising on key words.
"Addison Auto Repair & Body Shop in Denver for 26 years"
to
"Addison Auto Repair, Body Shop, Denver"

Think about what folks are going to Google and I doubt if anyone will use "26 years" anywhere in their search.

I would also repeat Body Shop in the keywords.

I would also try and get over the business's key USP's on the first page - the hooks to keep the punters on the site.

However, the key elements are there and this is certainly a BIG improvement on the old site.

Good luck with it all.

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SEO Specialist, CSS Developers

I like the old site better than the new one...the look was more friendly and local flavored, the shop goal more prominent and most aspects stood out from one another better (like navigation). On the new site, it is to cold and corporate-ish looking and the mountain/jeep doesn't convey the right "feel" at all.

Dave asks
"can you tell me how the new Addison Auto site sucks?"

No Dave, I never can. The only way I can ever tell if a site sucks is is to get feedback from users. Some sites look like they suck! - some look magnificent. . My rule is if they sell what they target - they do not suck.

If the site is to sell the Name 'Addison' I would prefer the marketing approach.
If the site is to snare local users searching the web . . Then I am lost without some in depth local knowledge...

Dave I can offer you a free IBL from Classic cars & Parts for sale Colorado classified adverts - This might give you one extra visitor a month.

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HI dave

Had a quick look and read the replies to date. Notices that Stu from CSSplay also posted - great site to visit for css tricks etc. Anyhow, although I am only a "simple" designer and not that much of an SEO guy I would point out that a bit more CSS and less java might really enhance the SEO side of things. Also, with a CSS absolute position for the header image you could move that to the bottom of the HTML coding putting the text right up at the top.

Also, you could use some good title tags in the <a href=''>links would help with relevancy to the links. Likewise the alt tags for some of your images could be a bit better - more descriptive keywords/phrases.. You could also build some depth with a longdesc tag and page - yes I know clients hate to it!! who really can provide a good description of a picture, but thereagain it does give room for more info for the spiders to read.

Your class="HomePageBoldHeading" has a background-color of #808285 with #ffffff text, this colour mix fails all the W3CAAA accessibility tests with a contrast ratio of 3.80 whereas 5:1 is needed for Level 2 (guideline 1.4) and/or 10:1 for Level 3.

But hey who am I but a first time user of this site and only a guy who builds simple web sites in Greece. Other than that I like the site and the design but feel it may be a bit "fussy" in 3 cols. but that's just me.

I think the site is great visually. I like seeing the photo at the bottom of the actual shop, then a quick glance shows me the map, and the awards (though it'd be nice if the awards logos were smaller so as not to take so much space). I'm not a huge fan of drop-down javascript menus, but overall, I think it's very nice. I see no need for before/after pics; I think the awards take care of the need for credibility.

As for SEO, I can't see any keywords on the home page (the new home page) that would help at all. No one searches for AAA rating or Torch award when looking for auto repair or bodywork. "Convenient location" text is there twice, and isn't doing any favors for SEO either. Remove the extra in the content (it's under the map which is where it should be). Add more keyword text, "Auto repair in Denver" is a start.

Does this company have a USP? Why should I take my car there? Are they fast, clean, efficient, clean, friendly, get my car back when they say they will, have easy loaner cars, popcorn in the waiting area (love this at Les Schwab)... Ask five people what would they put in a search engine if looking for a car repair place and see what they say. I'd put "auto repair vancouver wa" since I live in Vancouver, WA. If that gave me a bad result I might be "best auto repair" then I might try "auto repair review" -- I'd probably have to include my city and state since otherwise you get results all over the place. I like to find sites that are recommended by others, so if you can get satisfied customers saying how much they love Addison's, then that'd go a long way to getting you found in the search engines.

Kathryn

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