New Design Allows Auto Shoppers to Easily Find Most Popular Features; Returning Users and New Users Will Find Auto Shopping Easy and Fun

ATLANTA, May 8 /PRNewswire/ -- AutoTrader.com, the ultimate automotive marketplace, has launched the first major redesign of the company's home page in several years. The new design makes finding vehicles for sale and navigating to other popular features of the site easier than ever.

"With more than a decade under our belt as the top on-line auto marketplace, we've got great insight into how car shoppers use our site and the features they find most popular," said Chip Perry, AutoTrader.com president and CEO. "Changes to our home page over the years have been very organic, adding features, buttons and functionality as we developed them. However, the time was right to make a major overhaul of the homepage to make the site more user friendly for returning shoppers and for the flood of car shoppers who are coming to the web for the first time."

AutoTrader.com started the year with about 14 million unique monthly visitors in January and ended March with more than 16 million unique monthly visitors as more auto shoppers flock to the web to look for cars. "Our goal with this redesign was to make the site even more useful to our millions of returning shoppers and user-friendly and easy to navigate for the millions of shoppers visiting our site for the first time," said Perry.

One of the major changes to the home page is that the "Find Your Car" functionality has been made a dominant element of the page by moving it to the top left and highlighting it in a large blue box. This is a direct response to studies of consumer behavior on the site and customer feedback which indicated that this item is the most popular function on the site. The "Find Your Car" section lets users quickly and easily search for a car by make, specific location, body style or lifestyle. More advanced search criteria are just one click away.

Making more content and functionality "one click away" was also a major goal of the home page redesign. After 10 years of organic development, many useful features for car shoppers were several pages away from the home page, making them harder for the casual shopper to find. With the redesign, many features like the New Model Showcase, Research & Compare areas, Find a Dealer functionality and more are now featured prominently on the home page, with their content and tools just one click away.

"Increasingly, our shoppers are telling us that AutoTrader.com is the best place to find and research vehicles, and that we've also become a trusted resource to help them with information in the early stages of their search and with finding dealer specials, vehicle reviews, financing information and more," said Perry. "This redesign will help our site visitors at all stages of their vehicle search, from the moment they start thinking about buying a new or used car and want to do some broad research to when they are ready to narrow down their consideration set and contact sellers about specific cars."

The AutoTrader.com "Sell Your Car" function, where consumers go to list their own vehicles for sale on AutoTrader.com, retains a prominent position in the top right of the home page, owing to that section's long-time popularity among visitors to AutoTrader.com.

Other noticeable changes include a less cluttered look, larger navigation buttons, new headers and footers throughout AutoTrader.com and more color than AutoTrader.com's previous home page. The page will now also be centered in the computer screens, vs. the previous version which was flush with the left side of the screen.

Before launching the redesign process, teams from AutoTrader.com culled through a wide variety of site metrics and site visitor information, researched other consumer-facing shopping web sites both in and outside of the auto industry and conducted surveys and focus groups with more than 1,000 online shoppers to find out their preferences for web design and usability. Several mock ups of proposed new AutoTrader.com home pages were designed and those were tested with consumers to help narrow down the final, winning site, which goes live May 4.

"With the rush of car shoppers to the web only going to increase, this redesign puts AutoTrader.com in a perfect place to serve both car buyers and car sellers on line," said Perry. "We look forward to serving car buyers and sellers with this new home page and continuing to earn our nickname: the Ultimate Automotive Marketplace."

About AutoTrader.com

AutoTrader.com, created in 1997 and headquartered in Atlanta, Ga., is the Internet's leading auto classifieds marketplace and consumer information website. AutoTrader.com aggregates in a single location about 3 million new cars, used cars and certified pre-owned cars from thousands of dealers and private owners and the site attracts about 14 million unique monthly visitors. Through innovative merchandising functionality such as multiple photos, videos, detailed descriptions and comprehensive research and compare tools, AutoTrader.com unites new and used car buyers and sellers online to improving the way people research, locate and advertise vehicles. AutoTrader.com is a majority-owned subsidiary of Cox Enterprises. The venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers is also an investor. For more information, please visit www.autotrader.com.

SOURCE: AutoTrader.com

Web site: http://www.autotrader.com/