Website for personal experiences?
 

Hey all,

I did a couple searches and found only information that was piecemeal so I thought I'd ask the general populace :)

Would it be useful for everyone (current and prospective 8 owners) if I were to set up a database-driven website that would record and display info on people's personal experiences with the 8?

By personal experiences I mean things like:

Price they bought the 8 for
Options they got
Dealership they bought from (including city, state)
Ratings for their dealership or auto repair shop
Optional Comments
Current issues they're having
etc.

I figured it would be nice to have one central, focused location for anyone who's looking to buy an 8 (or repair theirs) to see what current/past prices are and what places are best to buy from or take your car to for repair. Just click a coiuple buttons and instantly get a list of prices people have had or dealerships they liked or whatever. Of course this is just a ballpark idea. I just got a new webhosting account and figured it might be a fun project to do :D Additional suggestions for what kind of information you'd like to see are welcome!

**Side note**
Of course it wouldn't be a forum or anything nice like this. Just a strict research tool. I.E. If someone wanted to find prices people have gotten in Oregon, what dealerships they were from, and which salesman they dealt with for example :) I figure the more info we can get about wheeling and dealing these sweet cars, the better!

Yeah this would be pretty easy to set up. Good idea.

Now I'm thinking that people would need to create accounts and log in to post their info (so they could edit it at a later date...ie current issues they're having). Unless there's another way...

Yeah I just realized that right after posting. Creating a login account is the only way I know of :)

I can think up a couple problems/decisions you'll probably have to make:

(1) how to make searching work well (this is always a pain)

(2) people could enter the name of a dealership in many different ways or even with spelling mistakes (which could cause problems in searching) ...I wonder if you could get a listing from Mazda of all the dealerships in N.A. and people could just select theirs from a list, after they've selected their state/province and city. That'd be sweet if Mazda had this in XML format or some other way you could get it easily into a db.

If you actually got this going and it was simple and easy-to-use, I could see a lot of people using it. You could even expand it to handle other cars, not just the RX-8.

Good point. I know of some PHP and SQL functions that help make entries (like dealership names) a bit more generic and hence, easier to search for. But yeah it'd be nice if Mazda had a nice XML listing of current dealerships in the U.S. I emailed Mazda North America already to see if they can provide me with one or otherwise point me someplace that already has it. The other problem to think about is maintaining that list of dealerships year to year (since some inevitably close down or others open up).

I've designed and developed some complex web applications at my old job so I have some experience in usibility and function so I'm pretty excited to start this project up. I already have a lot of ideas to make the site fun and easy :)

Awesome - sounds like you'll have a lot of fun on this project! Good luck :D

Wow Mazda North America answered me fast. No list of dealerships available :( Bah! I'll just have to figure something else out then. Necessity is the mother of invention.....or something like that. :cool:

I'm not a web developer, but if you know HTML, you should be able to get everything right off of the Mazda USA website. Their shopping tool has pulldowns for all of the dealers in all of the states.

Ps, of course Mazda is going to tell you that you can't have the list. you could be Kia or Hyundai looking for new franchises.

Yeah I already looked at the shopping tools. Unfortunately you can only pull down a list of dealerships around a certain zip code or city & state. I don't know about you but I don't have hours and hours to type in every city & state in the US :( Especially having to do that every year to keep stuff updated.

I'm thinking I may leave the dealership info up to the user via a couple options...either choose a dealership name already in my database or enter in their own (with a handy pop-up link to Mazdausa's dealership finder to get the correct info). The pop-up link would help cut down on misspellings and such because all they have to do it copy and paste! :cool: