Posts tagged website
mncandc.com
Apr 25th
mncandc.com
I was working at Bentley Minneapolis \ Maserati of Minneapolis back in 2008 when Luis Fraguada and Tyler Christopherson contacted me to see if I would be interested in getting involved with a new monthly show they were starting. Luis had recently returned to Minnesota after living in Arizona for a few years, and wanted to start a Cars and Coffee show similar to what they had in Scottsdale. What started with 30 guys in a Caribou parking lot has turned into the biggest show of it’s kind with over 500 cars, and 1500+ spectators coming each month to enjoy the show.
With increased interest came increased needs. Morries Automotive Group signed on as a title sponsor for the 2011 season, and as part of this sponsorship I agreed to get an official website setup, and consult on their social media initiatives. We started with a pretty simple design brief, looked at a few websites that they liked, and just in time for the first show, the new site went live in mid March. It runs on a self-hosted WordPress platform, with a fully customized theme.
blog.morries.com
Feb 10th
blog.morries.com screenshot
A big push for 2011 is the further development of our presence on social media. My plan to execute this is based around a robust blog, forming the hub of our content to be disseminated out through various channels. Full articles with photos, video, etc will appear first on the blog, before being re-shared on Facebook and Twitter. This is primarily to establish content ownership, and for SEO value. This will give us a channel to promote our philanthropic activities alongside our events and manufacturer news.
This is a self-hosted WordPress blog, using a highly customized Mystique theme. (I re-use this theme with different customization on this website, as well as the TCLA blog)
Morries.com
Apr 30th
Current Morries.com website
This was my first major project after transitioning to the corporate level. Beginning in late 2008 Morrie’s was rebranded from ‘Service is Key’, to ‘Buy Happy’. With the new branding came a new selling process, including doing away with negotiated sales in favor of a one-price model, and refocusing our business around building online sourced sales.
Original Morries.com Website
The original morries.com was redesigned in 2005, and was essentially a bust. The layout had poor usability and worse SEO. None of the websites ranked for anything beyond their store name, ie “Morrie’s Mazda”, and organic traffic accounted for less than 20% of visitors. This led to Morrie’s controlled sites generating less than 15% of all e-mail leads in 2008.
The redesign process began in December 2008, and all sites went fully live in April of 2009. I worked closely coordinating between our COO, our ad agency, and a third party consulting company we hired for some project guidance. Since that time all Internet leads have increased by 156%, with internally controlled lead shares going from 13% before the redesign to over 35% since, a 286% increase. Gross profit from Internet lead sourced sales has increased over 300% from 2008.
Original morriesmazda.com website
To begin the process we started with one site, which would become the template for the remainder of the project. The store I originally worked for with was chosen as the guinea pig, due to familiarity, and readiness for change.
morriesmazda.com first draft
The first draft submitted by our consultants was worlds better than what we had, but I wasn’t satisfied. I didn’t feel this design did enough to communicate our messaging, and the branding wasn’t strong enough.
morriesmazda.com second draft
Our ad agency took the design from our consultants and re-worked it based on my input. I felt that this got much closer to what I was looking for, but needed some work.
morriesmazda.com final draft
This was the final draft based on my edits. We opted to launch with a flash billboard with our new Buy Happy Promises featured prominently in the middle of the page. I felt this design best leveraged our new branding messages with ease of use, giving consumers 1-click access to any inventory their were searching for. This design also incorporated a new project we were working on – an embedded YouTube video player, loaded with customer testimonials.
morries.com first draft
Once the store pages were all complete, we re-worked morries.com. Under our previous web structure morries.com received very little traffic, and was not a significant lead driver. With our new advertising model focusing on driving traffic to morries.com it was essential we got this piece right. We wanted to be sure that our branding messages were prominent, but our number one consideration was to make it easy for our customers to shop for cars. This first draft was very close to the final product, with only the central navigation being significantly changed.
morries.com final draft
Here we can see the final draft of morries.com before it went live. The central navigation was changed to direct customers to shop by brand, but store locations were accessible via the arrow button to the left. This iteration was live for about 6 months before its first major revision.
morriesmazda.com rev1
In early 2010 we added an advertising slot to the store pages, and revamped the lower left box adding direct access to appraisal and credit app tools. The advertising slot was coded in such a way that we could manage the tile rotation remotely, hosting the images on our media server, giving us the capability to switch out these specials on the fly, without relying on our web provider to update code.
morries.com - today
Morries.com underwent a significant revision during the spring of 2010. After the success of using the ad rotation spots on the store sites, we added the upper and lower ad spots to morries.com, moving the ‘Best Price First..’ tagline up to the header, and adding an ad spot in its previous location. We re-worked the central brand\store navigation to better reflect the ‘locations’ button on the left side, and updated the Twin Cities Luxury Auto spot to better reflect it’s branding, and add navigation directly to their used cars. Finally, we added the Public before Wholesale module to the lower left area, replacing the under-utilized appraisal and credit app links.
twincitiesluxuryauto.com
Feb 24th
twincitiesluxuryauto.com
This was a pretty significant project, beginning as soon as the new Morries websites were done. We had added a Bentley franchise alongside Maserati, and decided to rebrand the business unit as Twin Cities Luxury Auto, another project I oversaw. Branding under this umbrella allowed us to share marketing where Bentley and Maserati would not.
maseratiofminneapolis.com
Our old website for Maserati of Minneapolis was the first major web project I was involved in for Morries, back in 2003. Due to the limitations of the CMS platforms available, we opted to build an entirely custom website from scratch. The website was built with a national audience in mind, making sure that it would be SEO friendly and featuring many things not seen before in an auto dealer website.
maseratiofminneapolis.com vehicle display
We had 30+ pictures of each vehicle, an integrated eBay auction formatting tool, and SEO features that soon made this website hit the first page of Google for “Maserati”; A highly competitive search term. We led many changes to the way dealers sold cars nationally – from photo quality and quantity, to being one of the first in the country to take photos in a professional-grade studio.
Fast-forward to 2010 and the automotive CMS platforms had finally caught up to what we started 7 years ago, so we were finally comfortable migrating away from our custom design.
blog.twincitiesluxuryauto.com
Feb 18th
blog.twincitiesluxuryauto.com
Based on the same customized Mystique theme as the Morries blog, this blog replaced a 5 year old blog originally started on the Blogger platform for Maserati of Minneapolis. The Blogger platform was originally chosen for it’s SEO benefits from being part of the Google family. It was later moved to being published on the Maserati of Minneapolis server in 2007, and when Google eliminated this service in 2009, it was migrated to WordPress with all old content imported.