SelecTrucks, a Freightliner Market Development Corporation (FMDC) brand, is a subsidiary of Freightliner LLC, a DaimlerChrysler company, and the leading used truck retailer in North America. When they first approached Pop Art, nearly every dealership (or “Center”) was on its own marketing path. If the Center had a website, it was rarely used, the messaging didn’t connect with customers, and managing the content was complicated, expensive, and difficult to track.

Pop Art's challenge: Take a network of truck Centers and provide them all with the latest in online marketing while allowing centralized control over much of the content, all in a tight timeframe and an even tighter budget.

As plans were being finalized, 24 Centers climbed on board. The Centers were sprinkled across the country from Los Angeles to Louisville to Birmingham, each with a unique design challenge and a shared desire for solid online marketing.

Think Nationally, Design Locally
Truckers are constantly on the road driving city to city, state to state. Because of this, SelecTrucks Centers face nationwide competition. Pop Art quickly realized the marketing value of creating a locally-focused look and feel to differentiate each Center and grow local brand affinity. The Pop Art design team was granted a lot of leeway to give each site its own personality—as long as the designs included the same standard navigation, each site could look wildly different.

The concept for each Center site was built off of the character and personality of the Center’s city. For Louisville, one of the first sites worked on, a “horsepower” theme was used, incorporating Kentucky Derby influences alongside truck glamour shots. Miami carries a Cuban cigar box theme complete with Spanish translation and a sunny color scheme. Memphis’ look and feel was heavily influenced by music posters designed by Hatch Show Print, Detroit by pinstriping on street cars, Chicago with a slick cityscape, and Charlotte with a NASCAR bend.

Creating these unique designs for each individual Center allowed Pop Art to immerse themselves fully into the culture of each city and create marketing messages that would resonate with each specific customer demographic.

Syndicated Content
Although each Center website would have its own flavor and design, FMDC needed to provide the Centers with standardized warranty language, truck details, and financial information. Because of this, a large portion of the content for each site would be the same.

Taking inspiration from network television shows which are broadcast from corporate offices to local affiliates, Pop Art worked with FMDC to define messaging that could be syndicated to the local Center websites. The syndicated content was easily housed in a central location and published to each Center site.

As a result, FMDC gained the ability to easily make a change to the syndicated content and see it immediately reflected across every Center site. This allows FMDC to ensure that messaging about products and services is always up to date without requiring the substantial investment it would take to replicate content updates to two dozen web sites. Pop Art was also able to standardize each site’s navigation and apply usability best practices across the board, elevating the entire network’s online brand.

Style Inspiration
The syndicated content, along with standardized inventory and site navigation, allowed the Pop Art team to become highly efficient at producing Center sites. The average website takes a matter of months to complete. However, Pop Art was able to build 24 unique websites in just 30 weeks due in large part to the application of Web 2.0 technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets ( CSS). CSS allows for the entire look and feel of a website to be developed and controlled separately from the site’s framework creating a site that is leaner, easier to update, and more flexible with design boundaries. With CSS Pop Art was able to clone an original site to be leveraged across all the other sites, recycling about 99% of the original site framework while creating totally different designs for each Center.

From 0 to 24 in 30 weeks
Typically, in any given week, the Pop Art team would be working on four sites at one time:

• The design team would be on the phone with one Center manager, using techniques like word association to get an idea of what design aesthetic they wanted for their site (e.g. urban vs. rural, antique vs. modern, bold vs. subtle).
• At the same time, the team would be completing a design comp from the previous week’s phone call.
• Meanwhile, the development team would be translating those design comps into HTML templates. The templates were all based on the same CSS standards that were developed early on in the process, which made for a lot of efficiencies and streamlined work.
• To complete the cycle for a site skin files would be built for the Content Management System, the client would input their data though our inventory integration tools, and the site would get pushed live for their customers to see.

• CSS standards were defined early on in the project. The end result was a remarkably fast site development time, dramatically reduced cost to the Center Managers, and greater ability for FMDC to manage common content across the sites.
• A well-coordinated effort between teams.
• Clear and consistent communication with the client throughout the project.