Why tramp around car lots in the heat or rain when you can check out geographic availability, price, and even customer ratings of your favorite vehicles on a single Web site? Kelley Blue Book is using Microsoft Silverlight to give consumers an easy interactive car-finding experience with the Perfect Car Finder Photo Edition.

The Perfect Car Finder Photo Edition is part of the company’s broader strategy to stay top-of-mind as the definitive vehicle-pricing resource in the U.S. for consumers, dealers, and individual buyers and sellers. Fifteen years ago, Kelley’s revenue primarily came from car dealers buying the famous Kelley Blue Book. Today, most of the company’s business is consumer-based, with revenues derived from advertising and lead generation on www.kbb.com. The company’s business depends on delivering a more interactive, eye-popping user experience, to keep customers coming back. Silverlight is a key component of that strategy.

When consumers launch the Perfect Car Finder Photo Edition, they see a whole array of cars and can zero in on particular models for a closer look. Perfect Car Finder uses Silverlight Deep Zoom technology to let customers do everything but smell the leather and kick the tires. They can sort cars by body style, price, and mileage, and then view high-resolution images with the interactivity to pan, zoom, and jump quickly between models.

Kelley Blue Book also took full advantage of its .NET development environment and Microsoft Web Platform to make information more easily accessible over a range of mobile devices and bandwidth speeds.

Today, Kelley Blue Book is able to offer vehicle buyers, sellers, and manufacturers a richer, more visually appealing, and more accessible set of online offerings than ever before. It’s a great example of how Silverlight, .NET and the Microsoft Web platform enables you to leverage your existing skills and investments to give customers compelling experiences that build relationships, create new opportunities, and keep costs in check. This flexibility increases the impact of every customer interaction.

Read the full story here.