Motors - review my car website

I know lots of you like me spend ages poring over PH and Autotrader, so I made this site to make that a nice experience.

Its not finished so I am looking for feedback on it - what I can change/add etc to make it better so comments appreciated. Spent about 6 months spare time on this so hopefully its half decent:

http://carspy.co

Just had. Quick look on my phone and its not very mobile friendly with the scroll down menus however if it searches autotrader and pistonheads together then I really like that idea and it's something I'd use providing the results are shown well.

I certainly love the look, and the responsiveness of the site - maybe add the first 3~ lines of the description for each car to the results page ?

I like it,

Are you looking at turning this into a full time occupation or just something on the side?

Looks like a nice idea. These do appear to be a few bugs like the sort ordering of the results. I'm sure that once those are sorted out thought it will be a cool tool to use . If you can get it working well on mobile devices that would be excellent as both the autotrader and pistonheads mobile search functions are rubbish.

I'm also guessing you have only done some basic filters are they are common between all the sites. It would be nice to have a little bit more filtering say by engine type and size etc. Not sure if this would be possible though.

On the whole though it looks like you could have a nice site going once it is finished.

Very nice idea - I never realised AT or PH had a API you could hook into?

From a UI POV, I'd make the form elements and text slightly smaller. I'm on 1920x1080 and still have to scroll to click the submit button. I'd also get rid of the google image search for the car model. If people want pics, they'll click on the car advert, and it's taking up space. Also, it seems a bit slow, as in the whole time I've been writing this it's been loading Impreza STi's and not come back with anything yet.

I'd add colour and mileage as options if you can as that's what most people would search on.

Thanks for the feedback.

Got to work on some speed elements.

More advanced search options in the pipeline, also working on a iPhone app.

As for APIs - only eBay have one. So you can guess what was involved; not really sure what will pan out with this, just playing it by ear. It's not like I am stealing their content and representing it as my own.

Making a business out of it - that's my goal but I've made £1.60 in Adsense so far so hardly quit your job money.

If any web/.NET guys are reading and want to get involved/be a cofounder let me know. I have 2 kids under 2 so getting time to work on this is difficult!

Hmm, but you are scraping their content? I'm sure you've looked into it but I assume their T&Cs allow this?

Site looks nice though. I just tried some Z4M roadster searches and kept getting an Ebay dialogue "No ebay feedback", even though I asked it not to query Ebay.

I agree the general car images are fairly pointless.

Yeah its scraped per request. As you can guess its not T&C friendly, but then again every search engine is in violation of the T&Cs in a similar manner. As I said, just seeing what happens with it. If I get a cease and desist I'll have a rethink.

I <3 the images. I mean for car guys like us its pointless, but if you didn't really know what a car was it'd be useful right?

Z4M roadster causing a crash is bad - will investigate.

Nice idea. Just searched for a car a friend is looking for and bought up 2 cars he hadn't seen.

Thanks

I think this is a great idea as in the UK those three sites pretty much sew up the market for where you should be looking. Perhaps gumtree as well, but I'm not sure how many serious buyers/sellers want to use free ads tha toften have tat in them.

Don't know how you're going to make money from it though. Long term I guess build traffic and a reputation to become the "go to" for searching for buying a car. Then you can start charging for "premium" ads that are outside of the three sites that appear high up the list on your search results. However that'll take ages and as soon as you start charging you'll get some sort of cease and desist from the two whose T&Cs you are violating. I don't know how much ad-sense income you can make form a popular site, but that's going to be the key whichever way you want to make money.

About the site itself I think you'd benefit from speaking to a UX professional or IA and get there views. Because it is a relatively ismple concept they'll be able to work magic in a day.

flat-6 said:

I <3 the images. I mean for car guys like us its pointless, but if you didn't really know what a car was it'd be useful right?

Click to expand...

Depends, when you search for a Golf GTI for example, all the images are of the concept W12 engined Golf from a couple of years ago, which isn't really representative of a typical Golf GTI

Spunkey said:

From a UI POV, I'd make the form elements and text slightly smaller. I'm on 1920x1080 and still have to scroll to click the submit button. I'd also get rid of the google image search for the car model. If people want pics, they'll click on the car advert, and it's taking up space.

I'd add colour and mileage as options if you can as that's what most people would search on.

Click to expand...

Agree with these comments.

EDIT- maybe some way to either filter or highlight ebay auctions as opposed to BIN or classifieds?

the sort option doesnt work correctly for distance.
manual / auto drop down would be nice, rather than it being a searchable item.
trader / private drop down would be nice also.

In fact, most of the options from Autotraders search would be nice

BigT said:

I think this is a great idea as in the UK those three sites pretty much sew up the market for where you should be looking. Perhaps gumtree as well, but I'm not sure how many serious buyers/sellers want to use free ads tha toften have tat in them.

Don't know how you're going to make money from it though. Long term I guess build traffic and a reputation to become the "go to" for searching for buying a car. Then you can start charging for "premium" ads that are outside of the three sites that appear high up the list on your search results. However that'll take ages and as soon as you start charging you'll get some sort of cease and desist from the two whose T&Cs you are violating. I don't know how much ad-sense income you can make form a popular site, but that's going to be the key whichever way you want to make money.

About the site itself I think you'd benefit from speaking to a UX professional or IA and get there views. Because it is a relatively ismple concept they'll be able to work magic in a day.

Click to expand...

Good stuff.

I think it can make money on adrev alone if it was popular enough. I don't intend to charge as as you say, the solicitors would be on to me like hot ****.

I have a friend who is an human interface PhD whose given me some good feedback. Why doesn't autotrader employ one of these people? Their UI is *so* horrible. Hence the need for CarSpy

Was thinking of tweaking the image search to include the years that are set, that should produce some better results.

Yeah, AT is horrendous. It's obviously been designed to ease the load on the server, but it makes the UX awful.

If they spent money on better infrastructure, they'd have a much better site and more/happier users as a result. Hey-ho.

I think you done a top job there i just hope you manage to extract some proper money out of it some how.

First off this is a great idea and properly executed I firmly believe you could be onto a winner. uSwitch, compare the market, confused etc... they all started like this I bet. that said, I'm about to be ultra picky. sorry.

I like the idea of the images but not the implementation. EG a fairly common car, a Seat Leon, brings back one image of a stock, 2 with a factory optional body kit and 1 with some completely horrendous kit on it. Skoda fabia brings back a Mk1, Mk2, Mk2 with again - another horrendous kit on it etc... Don't look at ford focus

The other issue is image quality - I guess you're pulling back the first entries from gimages but the size of these appear to vary which means you end up with a mishmash of quality, compression etc... just to fit your target area.

If the images were all good examples of the car in question I'd be all for this (and possibly a sponsored link to the website of said car?) but currently the roughness of the implementation puts me off.

I'd consider moving common searches higher on the page. I can see you're trying for a clean look (and I really like it) it's more useful than the other stuff down there. On some sites in smaller text under the search (or above the results) you sometimes see other suggestions or top searches, something like this might work but only if it didn't add clutter to your nice design.

Small stuff
It's possible to search for £0-£0.
If it can't find cars at price £3-£5k maybe it would be nice to auto-populate with cars from the price slightly higher?
Logo is huge and pretty dominating (along with the blue bar), if it was a bit smaller you'd have more vertical space to play with.
Do you really think people will follow you on twitter? Will you be using it? If not I'd ditch the follow link. Infact all the blue bar stuff is fairly meaningless for first time website visitors. If you compressed the top bit more you'd have more space for the results table / less scrolling for your users
"Site" column is left justified, would probably look better centred or replaced with the site logo.
The result table doesn't have the same look and feel as the search part of the site (hard vs soft corners, cell edge colour etc...). It would look better with a more consistent L&F.
favicon/magnifying glass image makes it look a bit like you're e-tyres or blackcircles rather than a car to me personally. Hard to tell it's a wheel from the favicon alone really.

I really like the concept. I think if you could develop it more with the layout it could be a very good website.

Scroll bars & search button don't work on apple iOS, which is a huge Market.
Love the idea and also like when you select a manufacture it shows some models.
Your in the right direction, doesn't look professional though.