Cars Ireland is Ireland's largest new and used vehicles classifieds website. With a catalogue of over 50,000 vehicles available from dealers and private sellers, the Cars Ireland website is a 24-hour business.

Together with the teams at Cars Ireland and Each & Other, Annertech partnered to redesign and rebuild Cars Ireland’s digital platform – CarsIreland.ie.

Following an extensive UX and Design process, Annertech took on the project to bring the research and design to life. The Cars Ireland website is, at its core, a search interface. The focus of the project was to create a search interface which was faster and more effective than Cars Ireland’s competitors.

Three screens of Cars Ireland website
Why Drupal was chosen: 

Drupal has been in use within the CarsIreland organisation for some time, and already powers a number of existing web properties within their digital portfolio.

This new website project called for the amalgamation of data from a number of sources and using the migrate API both at launch and on an ongoing basis, so it was a good fit for that requirement.

Furthermore, Drupal’s strengths in handling structured data with an excellent editor interface was a key deciding factor.

Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome): 

Project Goals:

  • To integrate with the Cars Ireland API to allow the vast amount of vehicle and dealer information to seamlessly flow through to the website in near real time
  • To architect and deliver an industry-leading search experience
  • To implement a best-in-class technical digital marketing strategy to ensure the newly launched website hit the ground running
  • Merge the content and management of a number of additional satellite sites to the main Cars Ireland website.

Our Approach:

Cars Ireland's aim for the project was to deliver a web experience that would position the business ahead of competitors for the near- to mid-future. To realise this goal, Annertech was instrumental in:

  • Pioneering an instant search experience through the use of the Typesense search engine
  • Architecting a responsive, clear website and search interface that allows the user to flow through the car buying process seamlessly
  • Expertly integrating with the Cars Ireland API to allow for 24/7 up-to-date data on available vehicles and dealers
  • Implementing a fully custom tracking system to allow Cars Ireland to collect a vast amount of user behaviour data.

Instant Search

As the primary purpose of the website is to make searching for cars as intuitive and as fast as possible, it was a non-negotiable requirement from the team at Cars Ireland that the end-to-end search experience was noticeably better than that of their competitors.

With this in mind, Annertech undertook an extensive research and prototyping phase to fully understand the options available on the market today. Typesense is an open source, "search as you type" search engine that Annertech proposed as the basis for the CarsIreland.ie website.

Please note, access to the CarsIreland.ie website is restricted to certain countries, so we have included a real-time recording of the site search below.

Cars Ireland Search

Results

As can be expected of a project involving such strong partnerships and intense effort, the results of the newly launched Cars Ireland website have been exceptional.

Annertech's relationship with Cars Ireland is only beginning, but the immediate public and industry response to the new digital solution has been overwhelmingly positive.

4millisecond search time

144%increase in organic sessions

Testimonial

“Our experience with Annertech was very positive and we ended up with a solution which was far beyond our own expectations. We don’t see them as a separate company, rather an extension of our own team. We were particularly happy with the process, which was collaborative and focused on delivering a quality experience for our users.”

Ross Conlon, CEO, Cars Ireland

Technical specifications

Drupal version: 
Drupal 8.x
Key modules/theme/distribution used: 
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen: 

Performance is a key factor across the project and those modules were crucial in executing a strategy which means over 80% of pageviews are served from the CDN, while still ensuring fresh content is available immediately to search engines and end users.

Community contributions: 
  • New Search API plugin to integrate with Typesense
  • Testing and using a number of patches across core and contrib
  • Presentations about the technical details of the project at DrupalCon North America 2021 and Drupal Ireland meetup.
Organizations involved: 
Project team: 

Annertech is one of Europe's leading open-source digital agencies. Founded in 2008, we have grown to become not just the "go to" Drupal experts in Ireland but right across Europe, working with a range of clients in both the private and public sectors.

Our mission is to help companies to embrace open-source technology to deliver ambitious digital experiences for their customers. Our philosophy is to never hoard our knowledge, but share it – with clients, partners and the open-source community.

Our clients include: Glanbia, Dublin City Council, National Gallery of Ireland, Folens Publishing, Irish Cancer Society and Oxfam Ireland.

Sectors: 
Media
Publishing

Comments

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catherinemaley’s picture

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