We co-authored a content management system for card yards, specifically second hand car sales yards. It is designed to be quite simple to update, requires input mainly via spreadsheet and can be customised to suit a particular car yards requirements.
Benefits of using this system include
- A spread sheet listing all the cars and features
- Easily edit the spreadsheet offline
- The spreadsheet can double as an in-house stock/price list
- Cars can be assigned to a specials page
- There is a page that lists the complete set of cars
- Update the site any time
Updating the database is done via a csv in excel and then uploading it
The cars page and full list of cars for sale page include a neatly arrange set of tables showing a thumbnail image of each car, the make, model, body, year and price. If you click on the photo of a car then you go to the detailed view page where you view:
- stock number
- price
- make
- model
- body
- year
- mileage
- motor
- transmission
- registration
- rego date
- colour
- comments
Plus there is space for thumbnail images of the car which when clicked on loads a larger view of the image in a neat ‘lightbox’ overlay.
The thumbnails are generated automatically. The large image is the one that gets uploaded to the server.
The script is fairly simple to install and it requires a typical php/mysql hosting environment. We can provide hosting for the script and website.
When we use the script we customise the pages to suit the site that it is on so that it will look like a neatly integrated component of the car yards website.
Other benefits the car yard will experience:
Easily add all your own photos to the website, you won’t need to pay a web designer or photographer to do that, your own camera or phone is fine.
This is not a multi business car listing software. So it is only your cars that are presented. If you refer a client to your website you can be sure they will easily find all of your cars without getting distracted.
As soon as your new stock is ready and you have at least one photo taken, then you can add to the car spreadsheet and upload to the car yard website.
The spreadsheet us uploaded from a simple web based form which converts it into the database for display on the website.
The photos of each car are uploaded via ftp.
Minimal training is required even for first time website owners.
Sites using this system include:
We didn’t design these sites but we facilitated the behind the scenes coding of the car yard sales and gallery listing system. These websites were built and managed by Matthew at www.maowebstyle.com.
The listing system is fairly standardised and we could easily change the titles of the fields that are listed on the vehicles to suit boats, trucks, trailers, bikes or some other sort of item that needs to be displayed in this standardised way.
If you are interested in having a vehicle gallery system for your own site please contact us.
