As many of you have noticed, EasyAutoSales launched our new website last week!!! This new look was months in the making and took hundreds of hours to complete. I wanted to thank everyone that were involved in the upgrade and praise those who worked the late night shifts and helped finished this 8 month project in a mere 3 and a half months.

If there’s one thing that I know we do well, it’s that we can listen and adapt quickly to the ever changing web. Is there something you’d change about our website? If so, let us know in the comments!

So what has the new look brought us? Has anything changed since the upgrade? Below are some highlights and stats from this past week.

- User engagement has already gone up 25%! Our community forums are being used and buyers are asking questions.

- User attention has also gone up! Shoppers are staying on the site longer, browsing more pages (+14%) and leads using our new form has also gone up. (+33%)

- Dealers who have upgraded their packages are seeing an increase in their traffic and leads. We have included priority placement in this new release to showcase dealers and private sellers that are paying to use or to advertise on our service. As our network of sites expand, the priority placement will be continued on to the new partner sites.

So what else is in store for us? We plan on doing a number of minor upgrade over the next few weeks and months to make sure our dealer services are comprehensive. If you have any suggestions on how we can help you sell more cars, please let us know at our suggestions board.

We are now only a couple of weeks away from launching version 3 of our website. Unfortunately with the amount of changes, fixes and upgrades we have been making, our original intent of pushing this out at the end of June has been delayed by about a month. (Hopefully that’s all though.)

The good news is that the new site will be a lot faster, more user friendly and come with a lot less bugs. In addition to some of the bigger changes we tackled, we also made tons of minor upgrades to make things run generally smoother.

The GREAT news is that we just finished a number of major sections on the website which only leaves a couple more to go. One of the sections we just completed is our new, Apple inspired Community Forums.

We are very excited about this new, upgraded section. The current forums while functional, has not been as used as much as we had originally believed it would be. Part of this reason is because it’s not apparent that it exists and we don’t do a great job of showcasing it on the website. In version 3, we are making the community Q&A discussions a bigger part of the overall EasyAutoSales shopping experience.

While car buyers and enthusiasts be able to ask questions and help each other out with car questions, car dealers are also encouraged to jump in on the discussions and help teach consumers how to buy cars. As a community, we’re hoping these personal interactions will help bury some of the negative stereotypes about dealers. Overtime, dealers that actively participate in the community will also be rewarded for their efforts.

So… thoughts on the new look?

WOW! We’ve been floored by the number of positive responses and participation from consumers to write short “tweet” like car reviews for our upcoming website. We’ve only been requesting the car review submissions for a couple of weeks and we have already received hundreds of submissions.

Here’s another sneak preview of our upcoming site and what these car reviews will look like live. I am biased but I think these reviews are damn pretty… and USEFUL! As the designer/programmer working on making this thing work, I’ve already been tuned to check out a number of models that I’ve never even considered looking at before.

What do you think? We would love to get some feedback on this and of course, your car reviews.

Summer is a lazzzy time. While most people are taking a break in the Sun, we are taking this time to iterate and improve our UI to make shopping on EasyAutoSales even better. Below is a preview of our new search box with a hint at our new styling.

What do you guys think? We welcome all comments below.

NADA 2009 New Orleans, LA

Wei Yang and I are currently on our way to NADA 2009 in New Orleans, LA. It’s only a 7 hour trip from Atlanta, so in the time honored fashion of our “Big 3″ brethren, we are road-tripping in Wei’s 2009 Honda Fit (no plans. no hybrids though). Wei and I believe we have a really exciting service and we want to share it with the rest of the automotive community. If you are a dealer, dealer vendor or anyone who just loves the site, please search us out. We’ll be the geeky guys with our laptops and iPhones. Pictures will follow.

If you have twitter, follow us at randallprince or wei_yang and drop us a line. You can also follow all the NADA twitterness @ search.twitter.com We’d love to meet as many people as we can and share the car love in this time of uncertanty in the automotive industry.