http://tomlongson.com Just another WordPress weblog Fri, 29 May 2009 18:01:56 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 http://tomlongson.com/?p=13 http://tomlongson.com/?p=13#comments Fri, 29 May 2009 18:00:48 +0000 nym http://tomlongson.com/?p=13 NewCars.com specializes in cars, and instead of powering the site with text-only search, we built a Javascript widget that allowed searching by make, model, transmission type, or bodystyle, right in the browser. Rather then calling back to the server every time a letter was typed, this unique search app preloaded the entire database of cars in record time to allow instantaneous results.

]]> http://tomlongson.com/?feed=rss2&p=13 0 http://tomlongson.com/?p=1 http://tomlongson.com/?p=1#comments Fri, 29 May 2009 05:09:59 +0000 nym http://tomlongson.com/?p=1 Much of NewCars.com’s traffic comes from organic google traffic based on keywords like “new toyota san francisco”. To help better convert these visitors to quick quote customers, my team revamped these pages from a list of text dealership addresses to a fully featured car dealer map, which is designed to allow people to either navigate with the left hand list, or the right hand map. By clicking on either the text listing, or the map marker, the opposite representation of the dealership would scroll or pan into view. This way, you could click on a text listing to highlight and center the map on that dealership, or click on a point on the map and the list would scroll and highlight the correct listing.

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