We have added 3 new Staff Page templates for you to choose from!
The new templates are accessible by going into the Staff Page settings and selecting any of the following: “Square Grid Layout”, “Circle Expandable Columns”, or “Circle Stacked Rows”:
Due to adjustments Google has made to billing for their Maps API service, we have made some slight changes to how we make calls to that API in order to get the most out of it.
Without getting too boring and technical, there are two APIs that we use to build maps on your site – the Maps API and the Places API. We had been making multiple hits to both of those APIs when the maps page was loaded, which was working, but not in the most efficient manner. Since our optimization adjustments were completed, we have been able to reduce the amount of calls made to the APIs, which makes the calls more cost-efficient.
As you may have seen in a blog post we wrote in January, we at DealerOn have been working to maintain ADA compliance across our platform for some time now. We recently conducted our yearly audit of our platform pages using the WAVE tool, and corrected the errors we found. Our goal is to create one less thing for you to worry about, knowing that we are monitoring our content and keeping ADA in mind as we come out with new platform features.
Additionally, our Support team is always happy to do a personalized audit of your site, and can walk you through the necessary adjustments, train you on best practices, and/or facilitate conversations with other vendors as needed to make sure your site falls within acceptable guidelines.
As always, please reach out if you have any questions at all, we are here to help!
We have completed integration and officially gone live as a Porsche Certified website vendor!
Click here for more information on the program, or to enroll with us.
Psst… we are also partnered with Porsche as a Digital Advertising vendor, so you can have more products under one hood!
The next time you go to add a new employee to your staff page, you may notice that the Edit Staff Page UI in the CMS has changed:
We have made some improvements to the look and feel, along with improving the overall user experience when adding or editing staff and departments.
Now when you add a new employee, you can designate what department to add them to either by selecting an existing one from the dropdown, or by typing a new department name in the field, which will then create that department:
You can also create a new department in the normal manner:
When adding either new people or new departments, you have the option to “Add Another”. Activating this switch keeps the creation window open until you have added as many as you need to:
All your adding, editing, and configuration options can be accessed by clicking on the orange button in the lower right-hand corner of the screen:
Also included in this fancy new UI are hotkeys – the menu is accessible by clicking the yellow button seen above, or by pressing Alt+K:
We encourage you to go explore the new UI – please let us know if you have any questions!
To comply with Google’s new rules about “review gating“, we have adjusted some functions of our platform.
Our platform reviews page will now link straight to the review site(s) you have configured via the Social Media settings in the CMS, allowing the customer to leave a review on whichever one they prefer, rather than giving an option for an internal-only form.
We have made a small update to the UI on the Edit page for a vehicle in your Inventory Manager.
The lock/unlock fields are now easier to see and determine status on – just click to lock or unlock and save your changes! The appropriate status will be indicated by the darker icon:
We have created the ability to rename a platform page, affecting how it shows in the Navigation and dropdowns (as a reminder: a platform page is any page that ends in .aspx).
Previously, to customize the name of a platform a “local link” page had to be created and then the platform page was hidden from the site navigation.
Now, all you need to do is go into Site Content –> SEO Options.
Enter your custom page name in the “Custom Nav Name” field:
Save your changes, and once the cache is cleared, your new page name will show up on the site!:
Happy Naming!
Just a quick note – we have removed the original site selector from the top right of the CMS. The selector above the dashboard on the left side will remain (released last year, detailed in this post). As you may have noticed, the new selector also appears throughout the CMS now, not just on the main dashboard.
What we removed:
What remains:
As a reminder, the newer version also allows you to type in any part of the name of the site you are looking for to narrow down your options:
As part of our ongoing effort to upgrade our systems and improve security, we have made a couple of significant updates that we wanted to share with you!
You have probably noticed that the Login screen to the CMS looks somewhat different than it used to. This change helps establish the foundation for us to improve security, add options for single-sign-on, and more efficiently integrate the tools we use across our platform to be consistent.
The CMS URL has not changed, but it will redirect to https://account.dealeron.com to log in, and then redirect back to https://cms.dealeron.com. This is similar to how if you go to gmail and are not logged in, it will redirect you to account.google.com briefly in order to sign in.
If you have been logging in with a username (JoeDealer) instead of an email (joedealer@dealership.com), you will likely have seen a message when you log in to the CMS alerting you to upcoming changes:
Since there is no longer a need for a single person to have multiple accounts, there has been an ongoing cleanup effort to remove duplicate usernames and email addresses. In cases where active users have more than one account, or there are multiple usernames tied to the same email address, we have reached out directly to resolve those accounts. At this point we have resolved most of the active duplicate email addresses and are reaching the end of this phase of the project. The last step is to convert all usernames into an email format.
If you are not already using an email address to login, you will need to update your account. You can either do this immediately, or wait until your next 90 day password reset. If you run into any issues while updating, your support team will be able to help you get back in action!