A quick look at the major UK car companies websites.

**There's probably a few in here that have been bought and sold by subsidiaries of Lada, Tata and BMW... Doesn't really matter. I just wanted to have a look at the websites of the major car manufacturers. A dozen or so was enough for one blog, so here are the 'UK' ones.

Aston Martin

Nice site. Big backgrounds on all the pages with close ups on various parts of the car, suggesting the kind of care and detail that goes into a build. Big rolling header pictures are wrapped up in Flash. Could have easily been done with jQuery to make sure more people can actually see it.

Jaguar

Another nice website. Dark and sleek with full pictures of the cars. Pretty much the whole site is built with Flash.

Lotus

Apart from the stumbling block on the landing page, it's a pretty nice website. More unnecessary use of Flash for simple rolling images.

MG

Nice website—and no Flash!

Mini

Pretty nice website. More Flash, and even the odd sound effect. The first site in this blog that actually uses Flash for some mouseover movement.

Morgan

Most amateur website by far. Things you'd expect to be links aren't. Guess work on how the menu works—some items drop out to submenus, others don't, no way to tell which is which.

Land Rover

Nice website. No Flash in site. Really nice lightbox style menu on New Vehicles with pictures of the models. Also has an almost sitemap of links in the footer which is pretty standard in recent designs.

Rolls Royce

Pretty slick looking website. Flash embedded, near full-width videos on some of the pages, or some really nice photography. Bit of a straing reading the light grey links on black. Sticky footer banner with a few links.

TVR

Oh dear. Under construction. One big image with bearly readable text.

Vauxhall

Popup questionaire when you open the first page. Urgh. Otherwise, a pretty nice site. Not much change as you're clicking through the models—bit dull. No Flash in site.

Westfield

Popup window blocked on their homepage. Really basic website. Looks more like a model airplane club than a kit car website. Too much text and text too small.

Conclusion

These sites make an interesting group—visitors to the sites will probably hang around and have a good look around. They're not likely to hit 'back' and go have a look at another manufacturers site. They are here for information, and will probably click around until they find it. These sites can therefore spend more time on producing a great looking website. Of course they have to be usuable and intuitive, but there is definitely more room for some eye candy.

This isn't an complete list, just the first that come to mind. If I've missed anything major leave a comment and I'll update the post!