I am struggling with my thoughts… i am ask to make a Italian Car-dealer website and i doubt if i can make it in Weblfow or just a custom Wordpress Car template.
It’s Ok to add many images per item, I doubt you have to enter many new models every day… (or do you? Is it a secondhand dealership?) however you can’t have more than 25 fields for a collection, so even if using a specific collection just for the images, you’re facing a limitation. Any evident solution that I see is using most of the images inside of an RT field, and keep dedicated image fields for heroes and features.
Not entirely true… you could use referenced collections for type and mileage, you could use options, and you can filter on it.
In the end I understand your concerns and yes for this type of site with many fields in many items, with the need to filter on many many thing, WF isn’t yet super equiped. I’m using the CMS for trips and departures at the moment and I ahve to deal with the limitations. It will be better.
Don’t put yourself in a situation where your client will be frustrated. It’s quick and easy to nail the content model on a test WF site and to present the pros and cons to your client, but be upfront about the limitations.
Thanks Vincent, its indeed a second hands car dealer, Ferrari’s and Masserati’s and so on. They sell 200 cars a year. About the images, i was thinking of 2 collections per car, Exterior en Interior.
I had a similar request recently (currently on hold) and I think for smaller dealerships with less stock, Webflow could fit the bill - less need for lots of filters. The project was for a maximum of 10 cars, and 5/6 images per car, so a different proposition to yours. I did have concerns about scalability though and hitting limitations eventually…
I guess an external dropbox gallery or similar is out of the question, considering the prestige nature of the cars, and keeping the branding, styling with the main site?
Just seen your reply to Vincent - interior and exterior could work well!
Indeed you’re around for a long time here as @vincent suggested Glad to have you here!
Site like this can be done in Webflow without a problem. It’s all matter of how you’ll structure your Collections. Let’s break it down one-by-one per your list.
What I’d suggest here is a collection called Photos - Exterior and Photos - Interior. You can then have a multiref field in Cars collection for each exterior and interior. On your details page you just need to drop a Collection List and bind it to multiref field Take a sneak-peak at how it’s done at this project. You can also look at the details page and the custom code there used for Dynamic Lightboxes (waaaaaat?!)
tinypng.org is a great place to start, but you can look into batch resizing images before upload. Tbh I never go above 2300px in width or height (Containerzzz!)
Custom solutions here I guess for now…
Can you give us some examples here? Maybe it could be done with a proper collection structure?
That seems like an overkill. It would be much easier to have a separate collection for Photos and maybe have a Switch for ON → Interior || OFF → Exterior and filter by interior/exterior two separate collection lists.
That would also mean that you can be flexible about the amount of items and it gives you less things to worry about when designing page. Just drop Collection List, bind to multiref field Photos, filter by Switch is ON for Interior Photos, drop image inside (or custom code for lightbox support!), bind to photo field, bind alt to alt field, set Collection List (not wrapper!) to display: flex, set Collection List Item to flex: 1 0 30% (grow, don’t shrink, and base 30%) and voilà!
Set another Collection List and do same as above, but filter by Switch is OFF for Exterior Photos
I think for a big car dealer there is a lot of extra options you could suggest.
Lightbox. (save your favorites)
User profile
Forms connected to specific car.
Multiple image upload.
Multiple spec selection. (brand, FWD, Color, when published, etc) (5?)
And the other things you mentioned.
And some changes to the Editor in these cases would have been great.
Image field and text field side by side so they are “grouped”
“grouping” fields in the editor in general to make a better user experience.
Set a limit to images size. Some field should have a limit of 200kB others can have 800kB.
I don’t want to downtalk webflow, but as a designer whose job is to solve problems, I think it’s important to address these basic needs a car dealer often would want But I guess it varies from dealer to dealer.
Thanks Krubens, your talking about a bigger dealer here… with a user profile… yes thats nice, i am glad the customers does not need it, because then i have to use Wordpress for sure.
For eny one who’s interested how this one went…
I took the gamble to make the website in Webflow.
Its online visible at: http://samvandalen.webflow.io/
The site is filled with video’s and cars.
Special is that the video’s are integrated from out of Facebook!
Facebook most populair post is a very nice item to!
Lots of custom Lightboxes,
Custom form html element added.
and take a look at the awesome footer!!!
Filtering is now done with tabs… not the best solution but nobody see’s this…
What i hope for Webflow is coming soon, because filling the site with one car takes me 40 minutes of work now.
Multiple upload element with pictures
Selecting Multiple reference with checkboxes… this takes ages also…
My cardealer went grazy after three days uploading photo items… and we aren’t even online yet!
After some thinking… and doubting…
We decided to put 40 photo’s in one collection item. No Thumbs anymore, and no ALT-Text per photo… Not so good for Google… but take now one hour per car to put it online.
ohhh man… i can’t wait for the multiple upload element…
