I had the opportunity to review the latest enhancements to the DealerFire website platform this week with the presentation coming from company founder Eric Hoopman. 

Last year DealerFire was one of the nine award winning companies in the 2009 ASMA Study. (download a copy) It is clear that DealerFire has not been resting on their laurels with the amount of new products coming to market and their Engine 5 platform.

This is not a full review of their website technology however on October 13, 2010 their technology will be part of the 2010 ASMA Study.  This year PCG Digital Marketing will review 46 website platforms and recognize the leaders in a number of categories.

If we had an award last year for the best graphically designed websites , DealerFire would have been a frontrunner!  Our team universally agreed that DealerFire sites stand out from the crowd on their design merits. The consumer facing website controls are well thought out and reduce clicks. Dealers looking to break  away from the typical website interface, should take a look at DealerFire technology.

Some of the newest updates to popular automotive website platforms include the ability to change designs, colors and page layouts on the fly.  DealerFire already has the ability and they have improved on the flexibility of those changes this year. Their core technology has a number of design themes that can be selected and each theme has modules and components that can be used to create customized pages.  We were shown many of their new features on their demo site located at: http://www.customdealerwebsite.com

DealerFire Mobile Leadership

DealerFire has one of the strongest mobile platforms we have seen with SMS / Text to mobile integration and one of the cleanest presentations for the iPad.   Car detail pages allow consumers to save the car information to their mobile phone.  You can see the call to action box on the right column in the   screenshot below. The presentation on my iPhone was very clean.  When the dealer calls, this feature makes it easy to discuss the car with data handy in front of the mobile user.

The team at DealerFire has also embraced social media by releasing Facebook inventory and coupon tabs for Dealer Fan pages.  I like the idea that the coupons are synchronized on the website and Facebook. An active Facebook community  manager could leverage these coupons nicely online.

DealerFire SEO Openess

In regards to Search Engine Optimization, their backend tools allow full editing of Page Titles and META tags.  The administrative tool allows users to drop in Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics Code for full transparency of site data and traffic.   The company also strives for full W3C Compliance and has sitemaps for both the text pages and a separate video sitemap.

Since content is king, DealerFire has chosen to integrate a WordPress into their base website package which is a smart choice.  WordPress is the platform that I prefer and the WordPress blog can be configured either as a sub-domain or as a sub-directory.

There were a number of features that we thought created a better call to action, specifically I liked the ” adopt a car”  feature.  Cars in inventory can be assigned to different salespersons so that on a car detail page a photo and phone number appears offering assistance. See screenshot below in the green boxed   area.

Another feature we liked was the ability to show inventory counts by model in the drop-down navigation menus, which can be turned on or off with a click.  The website nicely integrates video and has some nice hooks for YouTube users. 

The team at DealerFire is clearly passionate about their automotive advertising platform and we look forward to putting it to the test with our ASMA  evaluation team. Dealer looking for a personalized website and hands on customer service experience, should call over the DealerFire and schedule a presentation.