Motors - review my car website

flat-6 · 22 Jun 2011 at 16:25

Bug One said:
Just trying it on an iPad. The red warning messages could do with being near the submit button, or relative to the screen. I pressed it a few times and nothing happened and because it was scrolled down, didn't see the 'you must select a manufacturer' message.

Does it work ok otherwise? Didn't think the sliders would work being a touch device etc.

PH does have a filter but its very non-intuitive.

flat-6 · 25 Jun 2011 at 00:08

Hunting around trying to find what others are doing in this area and found www.netcars.com

Anyone had any dealings? They seem to be taking on AutoTrader with hot social marketing and plenty of SEO techniques. Looks to me like they even have paid bloggers generating content. Has anyone heard of them?

Tonight's CarSpy update - cookie set to remember your postcode. Also fixed some problems people were having with some models (Leon Cupra, 350Z) so they should work better now.

flat-6 · 25 Jun 2011 at 07:19

MarkDavis said:
Not sure if its been noted already but it doesn't seem to produce / search for all results. For example, searching for A3 sportback and <£6000 only produces 1 car which all 3 website searches ticked.

Will sort this out for you, got a few models that don't line up correctly across all sites.

flat-6 · 25 Jun 2011 at 09:59

MarkDavis said:
Not sure if its been noted already but it doesn't seem to produce / search for all results. For example, searching for A3 sportback and <£6000 only produces 1 car which all 3 website searches ticked.

This is simply because lots of people don't put sportback in the ad title. Try '5 door' or similar.

flat-6 · 25 Jun 2011 at 23:31

Mr-Xoc said:
Found a minor niggle. When I put the search down to 10 miles and sort the results by distance it sorted the results 10/6/7/8/9 and the other way 9/8/7/6/10. Other than that the site looks great

Thanks for this, didn't realise what people were talking about before when they mentioned it as I always searched for <100 miles and no cars were less than ten miles.

Anyway, I've added a natural sort algorithm for the distance field to now works as you'd expect ie 10 miles > 2 miles.

flat-6 · 11 Jul 2011 at 12:28

Update time!

I've added an advanced search as requested by lots of people. It doesn't work on PH as their search is so simple unfortunately.

The mileage seems a bit ropey on AutoTrader results, but I'm building the URL correctly so thinking it must be them returning results when they shouldn't.

Let me know how you get on with it: http://carspy.co

mark66 said:
It would be cool if you could have a checkbox or similar to either 'keep' or 'ignore' a car on the list. Then each day when you run the search again, those that you have ticked as ignore would either not show or be greyed out.

Have thought about something along those lines, like an eBay saved search that did email alerts when new cars matched your criteria - how about that?

flat-6 · 11 Jul 2011 at 12:45

grudas said:
why are there 2 steps between the prices on the selector - for e.g. 4k move to right - still on 4k?

Cos of the way I've made the sliders non-linear this is sort of unavoidable. I have to translate the step on the slider, run it through some exponential algorithm to get the price-curve, and then round it to the nearest £1000.

flat-6 · 11 Jul 2011 at 13:09

Morba said:
Age slider is annoying, why so granular for 20+ year old cars?

Why is it annoying? Was it hard to select the years you wanted?

I can tweak the non-linearity of it, of course.

flat-6 · 11 Jul 2011 at 23:35

MaX_PoWah said:
.co addresses sound like a good idea but it just seems to confuse most people i give them too, they always end up thinking you mean .com or .co.uk, even when they have an email from the address lol!

Yeah this is true, and will be true of any new TLD. But then again you can't get good six-letter domains in .com land for $8. It's a trade-off.

In other news, amazingly it looks like I am going to be on This Week In Startups tomorrow asking about SEO for the CarSpy blog.

If you're interested it'll be on from 9pm on http://www.ustream.tv/thisweekin

flat-6 · 19 Jul 2011 at 23:55

~Divine~Wind~ said:
Dont know if this has been pointed out,

Ont he selector for manufacturer, when I select list and hit M to jump to the correct section it justs highlights Manufacturer.

Good spot on this one, will think what I can do about it.

Miguél said:
Would be handy to put a filter that only showed results from private sellers, or at least distinguish between the trade and private sellers.

Will try and add this to advanced search. I like to ignore trade ads too.

------

Major update published tonight. Review links added, and the all important Google+1 button. Added a ton of missing models (mostly boring stuff) but it's more complete now.

Thanks for all your support people. Got some good traction from that web show I was on so trying to build on that.