

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

Hi!<p>I launched my passion a few months ago with a partner: A visual cross between Pinterest and Quora for cars.<p>www.projectvroom.com<p>We have sustainable, and returning daily traffic and can generate significant spikes using reddit to share our finds.<p>We organize, archive and encourage conversation around classic car finds on the web.<p>However, our user engagement is low. Sign-up conversion rates are abismal and engagement for registered user dies of within a few days.<p>I have a few ideas on how to fix this but with limited resource(and time), I would love some help from the community.<p>Which one of these or other would you put time into?<p>() Create a top 5 cars of the week email - generate returning traffic sources<p>() Integrate facebook account sign-ups - lower barrier to interaction<p>() Finish the internal upvote system (a la HN, reddit) - make engagement "cheap"<p>() Pull in info from carwiki, other sources - increase SEO and knowledge value of each page<p>Thank you guys, I appreciate it immensely.<p>Zhenya
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LeoSolaris
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.

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helen842000
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.

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Zhenya
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!

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hcho
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.

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Zhenya
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?

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

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Andrenid
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.

