For those of you who have never heard of Silverlight, you should consider taking a few minutes to learn a little about it. Silverlight will be on websites everywhere in the near future.

Silverlight is a new technology from Microsoft. Silverlight is a next generation enterprise platform for creating "rich internet applications". In many ways, Silverlight is similar to Adobe Flash which is used on a lot of websites today. The big difference between Silverlight and Flash is the underlying development tools and technology used to develop the software. Silverlight has superior development tools for creating enterprise applications. Silverlight is a small browser plug-in that has be installed on your computer like Flash. 

So will Silverlight replace Flash? In the long run it could, but in the short term Silverlight will find its home primarily in online software applications. Over time Silverlight will make its way to more universal consumer uses once it becomes more common place for the average consumer to have it installed on their computer. Silverlight does work with Internet Explorer, FireFox, and Safari. It also works on both Windows PCs and Macs! You can probably expect Silverlight to be bundled with Internet Explorer 8 and the next version of Microsoft Windows. It is also showing up as an optional install in windows updates.

How about some examples?

Kelley Blue Book has a cool tool on their website that uses Silverlight:
http://www.kbb.com/kbb/PerfectCarFinder/PhotoEdition.aspx

There are a lot of cool Silverlight examples on this website:
http://silverlight.net/showcase/

So where can you learn more?

http://www.silverlight.net
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silverlight

VinSolutions is actively creating software with Silverlight as we continue to push the envelope for automotive software.

Digital Dealer in Dallas was yet again another huge success for VinSolutions

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We heard a lot of positive feedback from dealers about the diverse training sessions they attended. Many of the dealers we met with had been to previous Digital Dealer shows. A testimate to the value the dealers find in attending the shows.

It is great to have the opportunity to meet with a large group of our existings customers twice a year at the Digital Dealer shows. It gives us a chance to talk to them about what they love about our software, and things they would like to see us improve in the future. Heck, a lot of our customers came by and got some free training at the show on our products!

Digital Dealer provides us a great opportunity to showcase our Automotive CRM, inventory management, and custom dealer websites to dealerships from all over the country. VinSolutions has attended all 5 of the Digital Dealer shows and plans on attending #6 in Las Vegas next spring.

I think dealers and website companies seem to put too much focus on optimizing only the dealer's home page and not the rest of the pages on their website.

Some dealers load up their home page and make it sort of ugly just to add keywords and content to it. What about just putting all that content on an "About Us" page that says what you do? That page will get indexed as well.

For example, search "deery brothers" on Google and you'll notice their home page is #1, but #2 is their "About Us" page which is full of great content, along with their home page.
http://www.deerybrothers.com/AboutUs-MasterPage.aspx

For a non dealer website example, search google for "dealer crm" and http://www.VinSolutions.com/crm.aspx comes up #2. Notice it doesn't link to our home page... Actually, our home page has no text at all on it! It doesn't need to... our website isn't a ONE PAGE website.

I guess my only point is, don't be stuck in the mindset that your home page is your only web page. You should optimize your home page, but your entire website should be full of optimized content. I would recommend creating as many custom pages as you can to add additional content. Also be sure to customize your page titles and meta tags on all your pages, not just your home page.