A Shortcode Instead Of A Developer
A widget is a working piece of your website — a grid of vehicles, a finance application, a map to the lot — that you place by typing a short tag into a page. Every one of them does something that would otherwise be a job for somebody who writes code. That is the entire point: the page you had in mind becomes something you assemble yourself instead of something you go and ask for.
✓New widgets are added to the platform as we build them and turn up in your admin ready to use. Nothing on your site has to be rebuilt to get them.
What You Can Drop Into A Page
In any page body
Placed By Typing A Tag
You add a widget by typing its shortcode where you want the thing to appear, then saving the page. That is the whole procedure. No HTML, no template file, no ticket, and no waiting on somebody else's calendar to put a form on a page.
On a page that sells cars
Inventory Anywhere You Want It
Your vehicles do not have to stay on the search results page. Put an inventory grid on a landing page, a slider across the home page, tabbed sets for different slices of your stock, or a search box wherever a shopper is most likely to want one.
Where you need the lead
Forms That Ask For The Sale
Finance applications, trade-in valuations, test drive bookings and plain contact forms are all widgets, so the form goes where the intent is instead of being parked on a contact page the shopper never gets to. Each one arrives with you as a lead.
Around the rest of the page
The Practical Furniture
The everyday pieces are widgets too: a map to the lot, your opening hours, image galleries, customer testimonials, and the breadcrumb trail sitting at the top of this very page. Small things individually — but each is a thing you would otherwise be asking a developer for.
Finding The One You Want
A widget is only worth anything if the person writing the page knows it exists. So the reference lives inside your admin and it is searchable: what is available, what each one does, and the shortcode to paste. You look it up in the place where you are already working, rather than in a document somebody emailed your predecessor. We deliberately do not print the list on a page like this one, because it would be out of date by the time you needed it.
✓See CMS Management for the pages you drop these into, and CARFAX® Snapshot for what can appear on the vehicles inside them.
What It Requires
What we need from you
Some widgets need something standing behind them. An inventory widget needs your inventory feed arriving, a form widget needs the form to have been set up first, and the map and opening hours widgets are only as right as your lot details are. The widget places the component — it cannot invent the information.
On our side
We build new widgets as dealerships ask for them, and we are genuinely open to the ask. If there is something you want on your site that does not exist yet, tell us — when it ships it appears in your reference alongside everything else.
Got an idea for something on your website? Tell us. That is how most of these came to exist.
Or email support@carcasm.com and a real person will read it.