A few questions to ask DealerSkins, (or any dealer website vendor you are considering):

1) “Do you have a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get Editor?” Commonly known in the industry as a “WSYWIG Editor,” any dealer website vendor worth their salt is going to know what this is, and it will be part of their core offer.
2) “How long does it take to create vehicle specials?” A great chunk of a dealer’s digital time is spent updating vehicle specials, so this one is key. With your current vendor, is this a five-minute process or an hour process? If it’s the latter, it might be time to switch vendors.
3) “How can your analytics inform my business decisions?” Nothing is sexier than ROI, so if your current analytics are too Draconian, or worse, “report overload,” you need to make access to crystal-clear, intelligible reporting your first priority. If you can’t understand for yourself how your dealer website is performing, you’re much more susceptible to the unfortunately vast sea of grey-hat website vendors out there.

@James: You are exactly right about “Flash Fatigue” being a great indicator that website vendors are adhering to outdated practices. Most modern website vendors have caught on to the drawbacks of Flash (too slow to load on mobile, no SEO benefit) so asking a vendor if they use HTML5 is another great “gut check” for choosing a new dealer website vendor.

Good luck, Chris! If you have any other website questions, you can feel free to drop James Fabin, our friendly resident website expert, a line @ jfabin@cobalt.com

We use both Dealer.com & Cobalt in our Group, and like both of them quite well. As I’m not here to “plug” web site vendors with a ranking, I’ll just leave it at that! haha

Good luck with your sites.

P.S. I see Larry’s in da house on this one (aka Dynamite Monkey!!). Larry always has a ton of good insight to share as well.

Why do customers come to your site?
1. To find a car
2. To schedule service

IS IT OVERTLY OBVIOUS HOW TO DO THAT THERE?

A lot of people use the internet as a phone book today is your phone number big and bold? Does it slap you in the face when you get to the site?

If not you need to fix that.

When they get to the vehicle inside your site is it easy to contact you about the car I am looking at?

IS THERE A CLEAR CALL TO ACTION “Call Me NOW”, “SUBMIT YOUR INFORMATION HERE”

All too often we just assume that the customer knows what to do…and will do it. They won’t.

The sexiest website is the one that gets your customer to the information they want quickly and easily answers their questions and directs them on what to do next.

Dealers the sexiest website to you is the one that CONVERTS visitors to leads. Leave the rest of that crap somewhere else.