Introduction

www.pistonheads.com is a comprehensive resource website for all the latest motoring related news, information, reviews, video clips, forums and classified advertisement. Individual or trade sellers for motor vehicles can place an advert on the website free or pay £7 for a premium advert. Pistonheads is also well known for its online car enthusiasts’ community.
The intended users for the website are motor vehicle enthusiasts, individual motor vehicles buyers and sellers and motor vehicle traders. A typical user of the website may want to read the latest motoring news, advertise their vehicle for sale, buy a vehicle, write on the forums or follow useful links to other motoring websites.

Weaknesses

The homepage (www.pistonheads.com) has some weaknesses first of all most of the information on the homepage is cramped on the right side of the website leaving a huge gap on the left side,  too many flashy advertisements makes the homepage look unprofessional, confusing and unpleasant. The links on the side of the homepage are too small and there is a lot of scrolling and far more information than required on the home page. All the above weakness maybe a barrier to visually impaired user. The other weakness of the website is the shop page where the user is required to enter his personal details is not encrypted i.e. not https.

Strengths

The website’s classified advertisement page has all the vehicles for sale in a logical alphabetical order and the amount of vehicles of specific models is also displayed. There are also separate links for used cars, new cars, motorbikes and parts on the same page. Once the user has found the particular vehicle and model they can then sort their search according to distance, price, mileage, year etc. This makes it easier for the user to navigate through the classified page and look for the particular vehicle type and model easily.
The other strength of pistonheads is together with posts of daily motoring news and updates on its homepage and forum it also has web feeds including RSS and my yahoo that users may be interested in to keep in touch with the latest news, reviews and updates regularly from pistonheads.Although the RSS feeds page does not work with internet explorer it works perfectly well with firefox.

Tasks

My first task was I requested an insurance quote for a used Audi A3 sport advertised on the website by typing in my general personal details on the websites Adrian flux widget at the bottom of the page. The Adrian flux widget gave me a quick insurance estimate of £5282.74. I found this widget on the website had some problems and kept displaying an error that my postcode was wrong and took me alot of tries to get it to give me a quick quote.
For my second task I registered on the website as member which was very straight forward and did not require a lot of details to be entered. I then posted a topic about the new BMW 5-Series on the websites forum again it was very easy to find the topic I wanted to post, which was general BMW and the forum page was also very simple and easy to use and you could also upload images and clip art together your post.

Evaluation of pistonheads.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Based on a work at psanghani.salfordbusiness.org.

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