Alex

Joe, I merged your topic with my topic I just created regarding the post above (Cortland Manor, NY). Moved topic to Automotive Products & Services forum and retitled.

Looks like Home Depot is piloting some stores and giving them some square footage for automotive parts. One of the Home Depots by me is on that program... Aftermarket News: http://www.aftermarketnews.com/Item/130070/home_depot_likes_what_it_sees_in_automotive_diy_retail.aspx

Yes, it will help because when a customer is searching for "auto repair in XXXXXXX" you want to come up in the results of the first page. Search Engines index your page titles and descriptions.There's more like keywords and backend stuff which I'm not sure how much you can control with Godaddy or other website builders, but check it out. I haven't used them myself.

Congratulations to Wes! Awesome renovation. I like the site featuring all the diagnostic equipment and the before and after pics.

Looks like you built it with Godaddy website builder, right? Looks good. I would recommend: Add page title tags. For example, your home page is simply "Home" <title>Home</title> and your other pages are the name of the tabs on your menu. See if there is a way to add a custom title to each page. Your home page title should be something like: Davis Auto Repair & Performance - Woodstock, GA Auto Repair

Thanks Joe, much appreciated! Thanks xrac! We have a 6 year old daughter who is now a big sister as of 8/24. All are doing well and all is good!

Usually parts suppliers offer tire fitment guides for a small fee like CARQUEST with online ordering, but if you are not buying parts and just tires, you should check out: https://tireguides.com/Products

That's what we used to call "overlapping" labor. At a shop I used to work at we would in some cases add a discount line on the invoice that read something like....Package Job Labor Discount - 1 hr. Something like that to give the customer a perceived value for doing both jobs at once.

Effective today, AutoShopOwner is officially branded as: AutoShopOwner - Automotive Shop Management Network Our new tagline is part of our company image now and is officially trademarked by the USPTO (Serial # 86111193). We believe this will better describe ASO to guests visiting this site, identify our mission in the automotive industry, and reinforce our commitment to the members of AutoShopOwner.

U.S. sets preliminary dumping margins on Chinese fridge products May 23,2014 WASHINGTON, May 22 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. Commerce Department on Thursday set preliminary dumping margins on Chinese refrigeration products whose technical name is 1, 1, 1, 2-Tetrafluoroethane, signaling that it may impose punitive duties on the products. The department made its preliminary affirmative determination that 1, 1, 1, 2-Tetrafluoroethane from China had been "sold in the United States at dumping margins ranging from 133.47 percent to 237.33 percent". Punitive duties would be imposed after both the Commerce Department and the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) made affirmative final rulings, which are scheduled on Oct. 3 and Nov. 17, respectively. If the ITC makes a negative determination, the investigations will be terminated. The U.S. Commerce Department launched the anti-dumping and countervailing duties probes over Chinese refrigeration products last year requested by Mexichem Fluor, Inc., a refrigerant producer based in the U.S. state of Louisiana. The company alleged that these refrigeration products from China were sold below the fair value of the products in the U.S. market with dumping margins at 198.52 percent, and Chinese producers and exporters also received improper government subsidies. Imports of these products from China were estimated at 34.7 million U.S. dollars last year, according to U.S. official data. China has repeatedly urged Washington to honor its commitment against protectionism and work with China to maintain a free, open and just trade environment. Source: http://www.shanghaidaily.com/article/article_xinhua.aspx?id=219939

Welcome back! The search button looks like a magnifying glass on the top right when logged in, below the Welcome, ...

E-Inspect: http://einspectpro.net/ Autovitals: http://www.autovitals.com/ AutoVitals Tech-Net member version: http://www.autovitals.com/the-tech-net-eis-edition/ AutoVitals Napa Car Care member version: http://www.autovitals.com/product/dvi/

Sorry it took me so long to reply, I must have missed this. By anyone I believe you mean technicians. We don't allow advertisers or solicitors in without prior approval and usually kick them off right away. Our feeling has always been that most shop owners started as techs so why alienate them. I was a tech, Joe was a tech, and many of you were and are still techs. A tech that has no interest in starting a business will most likely not waste their time on this site. ASO is a business and for a business to sustain itself, there needs to be income. We are not looking to be the next Facebook for shop owners but instead a valuable automotive tool for automotive businesses. Contrary to popular belief, it takes more than a domain name and a $20 hosting plan to run a successful dynamic website. There are costs and allot of time behind it. I don't feel that I need to go into details, but if everyone purchased a paid membership, it would be a different story. The reality is that 95% of the members here are here free with no obligations. Anyone here is welcome to start their own website and give it a go with the format that is most appealing to them. If we close the site off to the public and remove the free membership, most will complain. There is no way this site will be up without income to sustain itself and afford itself continued growth, the same as any business. I mentioned before that we were willing to create a forum area for premium members, but it sounds like nobody wants to pay $29.99 a year....That would solve the issue. It needs to be differentiated and we cannot discriminate by invite only. Those forums would be closed off to the public and if anyone wants to participate, they can become a premium member rather than a free one. But again, people want free it seems to me. There are 2 issues in this topic that I see: Open to the public and Technicians joining. We can solve some of this, but policing everyone is impossible without a fulltime staff.... We are brainstorming other solutions, one of which would be to limit viewing a topic by guests to the first post and require registration or logging in. That's just an idea but it may hurt our search engine standings.

#1 Correct, they will not be on for you in that membership level. Others will see ads that don't subscribe to a Gold membership. Forums are open to the public, that is unrelated to our membership packages. #2 Take a look at this page: http://www.autoshopowner.com/membership_packages.html It explains the different membership packages we offer. If there is interest in adding private forums, I'd like to start a new topic on it.

This is a great discussion. Lets see if I can answer some of your responses. Thanks for laying it out in an easy to understand format. The target is and always was to increase membership and grow ASO. Just to put it into perspective, we have been online since 2006. Lets just say we made some changes and only got it going by 2009...in that time, we have 1360 registered members, of which many do not participate. The ads that run on this site are mostly default ads from Google Adsense that generate very little and are based on clicks (if anyone is familiar). You want to help ASO? Click on an ad...lol. They are somewhat uncontrollable and based on page content and past browsing on your pc/device as I mentioned earlier, but we can block certain ones if we know what they are. Collectively they amount to help pay for a server to host this site, thats it (more traffic would obviously raise the ad clicks). But then there are software and licensing fees along with any upgrades we need/would like to do that all require funds (just like the overhead fixed costs in any business), which come from the limited premium membership fees we collect. Maybe its a misconception because of how ASO looks and feels (shameless plug)....we are not quitting our "day jobs"...lol. We also hope that if members want an "ad-free" experience, they support ASO my purchasing an annual membership at $99. I'll even go as far as say we'll extend an offer to anyone who would like to try it! Just PM me. Our membership packages are located here. By bringing in "organic" search engine traffic, we hope to bring registrations and participation. If we close off the forums, we will not get listed in ANY search engines (except for maybe the main page/domain) for the topics at hand and will not get any new registrations and/or participation. If that was our goal with ASO, we could just start a facebook or yahoo group and go off of invites and tap into an existing user base. I'll wrap this up with this thought....If there is desire, we can set up a private forum category for those who are concerned about posting and revisit in a year to see how it goes and expand on that if needed. We can call it "Shop Owner Private Forums" or "Premium Member Forums" or something like that and restrict it to premium members only. I hope you and everyone else sees that we are willing to be flexible and cater to our member base, but if we close it all off, we would need to charge everyone a membership fee which other sites like this one, do not do as they remain open to the public as well.

Thanks for the response Spence. Although you have some well thought out points, I suppose we can't please everyone. You are currently registered as a free member here on ASO, so I'm not sure how much more value for your money you are looking for. If you want an ad free experience, again, you are welcome to upgrade your membership. If you don't see value in $99 for a year...for an "ad-less" experience for the amount of time you are online, I'm not sure I have a solution for you, sorry. If you'd like to try it out for a month, I'd be happy to extend that courtesy to you. You are welcome to PM me to discuss further. As far as private forums, our forums used to be closed off to the public a few years back, but that proved to be unsuccessful as we did not generate any traffic until we opened them up and made them unrestricted to search engines. Now, I have to tell you from an online searching point of view, I can't imagine a non-automotive person waking up in the morning and searching for an "Autel" or "how to pay technicians"...More than likely this site is not coming up in their searches.There are over 800 million sites on the net, someone has to be searching for the specific topics for us to land on the first page of the search engine and generate a click to this site. In addition, if they do land on our site, they most likely leave once the the content was not what they searched for entirely.

Spence, thanks for your comments. As the co-founder, let me explain a bit on these 2 points you made. Most of the ads likely show relevency to the post/page being read or a user's past browsing experience. The ads and limited membership fees help keep this site up. There is a $99 annual membership available that will give you an "ad free" experience if you like, otherwise ads will show for free and other membership levels. Contrary to popular belief, running a dynamic website is more involved than simply purchasing a domain from GoDaddy and throwing a page up. We need to have some sort of revenue stream to support it. As far as keeping the site open to the public, the main reason for this is search engine indexing. Google, Bing, Yahoo and others will not index a closed site. If a shop owner or someone else searches for a term on Google, we want to be found and increase our relevency, registration, and participation. We do not advertise, so we depend on organic search results. Ideally, we should be found by terms searched in a search engine online (this is why topic titles play a big role as search term keywords). Hopefully this sheds some light on these two issues you brought up.

Congratulations on the new shop! Thanks for sharing the pics, looks great!!!

Our primary target audience has always been shop owners like the domain and site title state. We have always had these registration positions available: We also felt that many shop owners were once technicians as well, and there would be some mentoring or business startup informaton available as a knowledge point from existing shop owners to "would be" future shop owners. By no means do we want to upset or discourage our core audience and as ASO grows, maybe we need some customizing, which we are more than willing to do. Our forum categeries here are currently: General Discussion Automotive Repair Shop Management Automotive Repair & Technical Discussions Auto Body Collision Shop Business Automotive Shop Classifieds & Resources AutoShopOwner Photos & Videos Ideally, shop owner business discussion could be happening within the specific forums under the category Automotive Repair Shop Management and Auto Body Collision Shop Business (maybe we should re-title to Management). Maybe these forums should be moderated better by us, maybe not. We could also add a category for technicians and "would be" shop owners if that would help. I think we would rather people join and be truthful about their positions than restrict them and have new members lie and sign up as shop owners. It's difficult to control registration and we are not big enough or profitable enough to validate everyone's positons, we try hard to keep spammers away as it is...lol. Just some thoughts on this topic, we appreciate everyone's input.

Merry Christmas!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Just removed another spammer this morning from India...