Wheel Power in Huntington Beach, California is one of North America’s largest distributors of aftermarket wheels for the European tuning market. Usually when it comes to the European car crowd, “tuning” means body kits, wheels, and coilover suspensions that slam the car to the floor.
They carry all the popular brands: AC Schnitzer, Brabus, Carlsson, Hartge, Hamann, MKB, Novitec Rosso, RDSport, Rinspeed, Sportec, Techart, Wald, you get the idea. It’s all high end and pricey enough. I remember these guys pushing Hamann pretty hard when I was in high school back in 1999. It’s pretty cool that almost a decade later we’re working together.
Wheel Power approached me to design and develop a one off MySpace profile to support their social media campaign. My idea was to essentially design a page that would funnel traffic outside of MySpace and into landing pages on their website, allowing them to better target and track their traffic.
MySpace pages are great for what they are but have no support for tracking goal conversions. They were never designed for any other purpose aside from sharing personal information with friends and socializing. But if you’re able to take the traffic to one of your own pages, it’s easy to setup Google Analytics and do something with it.
Well, after building this profile for Wheel Power, I honestly doubt I’ll do one of these again unless there’s something really motivating behind it. Maybe things have changed since early 2008, but at the time, MySpace made it very difficult and inefficient to do anything with the frontend.
Lots of the profile had to be hard coded so I used images to replace a lot of the text that was dynamic. I know there are ways to make it work with the backend, but in terms of how much return you might get out of one of these pages relative to how much you’d spend to develop it, I honestly didn’t see it being worthwhile.
