Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Custom Web Designing Features for Automotive Dealers' Sites

Today, a significant number of car purchasers are using Internet to research and purchase vehicles. Aware of this rapidly growing trend, many automotive dealers are using Internet as a first hand medium to reach out to their potential customers. With increased competition in online advertising and marketing, you need to ensure that you maintain a dynamic website that reflects the values and objectives of your dealership apart from driving in more sales.

Websites are the means of communication over the Internet through which you can let the potential customers know about your products and services. However, just getting an automotive dealer website is not enough. You should have a visually-engaging and customized website that leaves a strong first impression about your dealership. You need to have a unique, professional, and effective custom designed website to reach car shoppers precisely and convert them into car buyers.

In order to make your custom designed website effectively connect with shoppers, have an edge over competitors and to generate more sales leads, you should get a complete set of custom web designing features.

Features
Before learning about the features of a good custom web design, you need to understand that each and every customer has a different need, preference and expectation from your website. So, you need to have a professional, custom made website design that contains the perfect blend of design and content apart from being user and search engine friendly. Some of the amazing features of a customized website for your dealership are:

Easy to navigate
Even the most attractive website is of no use for the customer if it is not easy to navigate. It should be easy for the visitor to move around in order to stay long enough to purchase from your dealership. The visitor may become frustrated and leave the site if it is not user friendly. Remember, there are many other auto dealer websites offering the same or similar products and services that the person can visit.

Custom websites on the other side are designed user-friendly to make the visitors comfortable in finding the information they are looking for. Flexible and customized options help the visitors to easily and effectively get the details of all products and services your dealership offers. This helps in increased conversion to phone calls and dealership visits.

Quality content
The first thing for which a customer comes to your website is content. Your website is a container of information about your dealership. It is vital to the success of your dealership to provide enough relevant content that caters the needs of each and every visitor.

As a car dealer, you would definitely want to tell who you are, where you are located and what you offer to the car shoppers. A good custom designed website exposes your dealership in a positive way with all the information the customer is looking for. It should have properly structured content, which enhances the image of the website and attracts more potential customers.

Another important benefit of having good and properly structured content on your website is that it improves search engine rankings.

Search engine friendly site development
As your website holds the reputation of your dealership and as it brings potential customers to your dealership, it is very important for you to ensure that it comes in the first page results in the major search engines. Your competitors are always there to snatch sales from your market area. So it is very important to improve your site's visibility on search engines to dominate them.

As custom designed websites are optimized for search engines, they come a way ahead than the traditional web designed websites. The background coding of a custom made website influences its success in the major search engines. It is very important in today's cut-throat competition among the auto dealers.

RFQ feature
A custom made website will always be more adaptable to your company's needs. It includes website conversion pathways such as Request For Quotation (RFQ). It allows your potential customers to contact you and request prices on products or services your dealership offers. Online RFQ feature encourages your visitors to make a purchase from your dealership as it requests action.

Monday, June 11, 2012

Designing Next-Generation Automotive Center Consoles

With the trend of increased adoption of consumer electronics in the automotive industry, the design of the center console is undergoing a major shift. This article covers some of the emerging trends which are finding increasing adoption in the center console. These technologies not only provide a seamless human machine interface for when the passenger uses a cell phone or the car navigation unit, but also enable automobile manufacturers to save money, improve reliability, and create a shift in the aesthetics of the car.

With greater emphasis being placed on the user experience and an increased need for design differentiation, automotive human machine interface (HMI) has gone through a paradigm shift and is taking the user experience to a whole new level. The center console, located in the center of the front interior of an automobile, has a display and control switches for Infotainment, HVAC, communication modules, and other functions. It is an essential component of an automobile interior as it consolidates access to these systems and provides the user with all the relevant information required for an enhanced and controlled driving experience.

Traditionally center consoles have been a stack-up of Infotainment and HVAC modules with mechanical control switches on relatively flat plastic overlay. These modules work independently of each other, have different design formats, and utilize separate communication channels. To implement this architecture, there are dedicated companies supporting car manufacturers for one or more of these modules. Consumers also have the option of buying these modules separately from aftermarket distributors.

The emerging center console
With the availability of advanced technologies coupled with increased focus on the human machine interface aspect of center console design, a change is being ushered into the design model of center consoles. Technologies prevalent in the consumer space are being adopted for the automotive environment and are enabling engineers and designers greater freedom in design of the console.

Capacitive Touch Sensing:
Put simply, a capacitive sensor is composed of a pair of adjacent electrodes. When a human being (or any other conductive object) comes in proximity to these electrodes, there is additional capacitance between the electrodes and the object which can be measured to detect the object's presence.

Using this technology, it is possible to build touch sensors acting as buttons, sliders, trackpads, etc. Alternately, capacitive sensing can also be used for proximity sensing where no contact is required between the sensor and the user's body. Such technology becomes even more powerful in conjunction with programmable mixed-signal controllers. These integrated devices enable the measurement of capacitance intelligently to detect human proximity across range, direction of approach, gesture recognition, etc. They also enable the possibility of integrating other functions like controlling motors and LEDs to provide feedback to the user based on touch/proximity.

Evolving ecosystem:
Such changes in design methodologies require a changing role amongst each member of the value chain. Car manufacturers traditionally have focused departments for each component of the center console that are responsible for the complete design of the component, including what will show on the front panel. However, the integrated design methodology requires that the user interface be directly handled by a collaborative team focused on HMI. Such changes enable greater focus on the actual HMI design.

Such technologies also require greater cooperation between semiconductor and other technology companies with car manufacturers to enable creation of suitable devices and technologies. Such collaboration is resulting in greater dynamism in the ecosystem and providing a platform for accelerated technology development.

Availability of advanced HMI technologies like capacitive sensing and capacitive touchscreens with support for standard automotive communication protocols are ushering in a change in the design of the center console of the car which is now moving towards an integrated front panel. Such panels provide a number of advantages including better styling, uniform look and feel of front panels, lower number of grooves and mechanical components, lower tooling costs, and increased reliability.