Ask HN: Whats next for my classic car hobby site? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Whats next for my classic car hobby site?

6 pointsZhenya7 comments

Hi!

I launched my passion a few months ago with a partner: A visual cross between Pinterest and Quora for cars.

www.projectvroom.com

We have sustainable, and returning daily traffic and can generate significant spikes using reddit to share our finds.

We organize, archive and encourage conversation around classic car finds on the web.

However, our user engagement is low. Sign-up conversion rates are abismal and engagement for registered user dies of within a few days.

I have a few ideas on how to fix this but with limited resource(and time), I would love some help from the community.

Which one of these or other would you put time into?

() Create a top 5 cars of the week email - generate returning traffic sources

() Integrate facebook account sign-ups - lower barrier to interaction

() Finish the internal upvote system (a la HN, reddit) - make engagement "cheap"

() Pull in info from carwiki, other sources - increase SEO and knowledge value of each page

Thank you guys, I appreciate it immensely.

Zhenya

Upvoting and intelligent links to info sites would be my top two suggestions. Allowing users to showcase how they tuned their cars would make it something like a facebook for cars. Featured cars could be a simple slightly random spotlighting of a few cars that are in the top ~30% upvote ranks.

Right now it looks like it is geared towards the "Ohh shiny! Lemme get my camera!" crowd than the "Here is the work of art I poured my blood swear and tears into!" types. Appealing to the former nets more users, while providing a forum for the later gives you more dedicated users.

Take a look at how 500px have built the rating system. They make it really addictive to post content & get high scores & praise from the community. This is because as soon as you click on an image it makes a big feature of the person that posted it. It's very easy to then click around on other items that person has posted (probably similar high quality) Contributors want to become known for posting great content, users start to recognise who the great contributors are through their avatar/profile building up a sense of community.

This is great, thank you! I do a lot of analytics work for my day job and have been writing some fun things on this database. It is a great idea to expose that data to showcase the contributor.

Thanks!

There are quite a few UX issues in your detail view pages. Browsing is not intuitive, your use of whitespace is amateur at best. Your call for actions is not there.

Sorry, if I am sounding harsh. These things matter quite a deal when it comes to retention. You have a lot of room for improvement in that area. Seek professional help if it's not your cup of tea.

Harsh is what I'm looking for ! Thank you !

I have looking for a UX team member, meanwhile could recommend a site/tutorial/book to help me learn the basics?

The quickest will be to copy from a real estate or a used car web site.

To me it's not obvious what it is (and I'm a big car nut).

It looks like a used car sales site, that has comments. If I was a car nut looking for car info sites or a car community (which I am), I'd dismiss it nearly instantly as "just another car sales site" and close it.

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