Interactive Work
Woods Auto Gallery
Project Date 09.2004
Ingredients
ASP / Access, CMS, CSS, XHTMLDescription
Woods Auto Gallery of Columbia, Missouri had an ailing website that had been around for almost 5 years. It's primary purpose is to display the current inventory and generate leads of interested car buyers. While the site has a small but steady following of visitors, it had never actually generated a lead that could be directly tied to the site. A practical concern was that the site uses a standard 640px by 480px image of the cars. To achieve a thumbnail for the featured cars on the homepage, the large images were forced to a smaller size. This fake thumbnail still took a long time to download and made the homepage very sluggish.
The design inspiration, based on the idea of a gallery of luxury cars, came from researching websites of modern art galleries. Of note was the trend of simplicity and lack of color--no element that might detract from the real attraction.
To solve the problem of generating thumbnails, we installed a .NET image resizing utility. The tool, utilized in the site administration, creates a thumbnail from the full sized image when the image is uploaded to the site. By implementing this technology, we were able to speed up the home page load time and add thumbnails to the complete inventory page, greatly enhancing the online shopping experience. As a result, within the first week of the launch of the new site, the client received several leads directly from the site.
* Agency Work: This project was produced while working as Interactive Director at an agency in Mid-Missouri. All agency work that I display, unless noted, was executed by me from concept to design and code.
