J. R. Parrish is a local Santa Cruz area commercial real estate company that first contacted me in late 1990-s. I was moving from interpretation and translation into the web development business and learning Cold Fusion Server. I ended up building my first commercial project web site for them. The site served them really well for 5 years, but in 2005, it felt really old. I wrote the old site in CF v 4.5 and in 2005 we were up to version 7 and there is an abyss of improvements between the two versions. Plus, the hosting company we originally signed up with was sold and resold many times over and there was no support and no improvements.
So, J. R. Parrish decided it was time to move on and rebuild the web site anew, using new technology, and new hosting:
- Database migration. Old Access database needed to be migrated to the enterprise strength MS SQL Server.
- Improved Administrator. A new web browser based back end administrator needed to be written to improve record creation and image manipulation.
- Server side image processing. Image uploading was streamlined and included automatic generation of thumbnails to be used in property list pages. This means that any jpeg image can be uploaded to the site and the server will resize it automatically to fit within designed parameters, like 100 pixel wide thumbnails.
- On-The-Fly PDF files. Using ColdFusion MX 7 functionality allowed me to set the new www.jrparrish.com web site to generate PDF files on the fly from property lists and email them to visitors. There is also a facility within the administrator to generate a PDF file of all properties listed by the company and bulk email it to addresses in the database.
- Tracking Properties. A totally new feature was built for the new www.jrparrish.com web site that allows site visitors to "track" or "mark" individual properties across multiple searches. This feature acts like a shopping cart, except in the end visitors have an option to generate a PDF file of selected properties and email it to themselves or their business partners.
- Search and Filter. Searching for properties was also streamlined and the search bar was moved to the right side of every page so it is always as Bill Gates says at the users' fingertips.
- Search Engine Optimization. The old site has not been optimized at all and there was also something in the setup of the old hosting company that prevented Google robots from even indexing the old site. There were no special, out of the ordinary SEO tasks that were performed with the new www.jrparrish.com web site, beyond standard things like dynamic generation of title, descriptions and other special header tags. Obviously, I did make sure that the main search keywords were present in all of these on as many dynamically generated web pages as possible. In two months, www.jrparrish.com made it to the first page at Google.
This project is a great example of a custom made web site that is easy to use, has tons of features users expect and some features that make users take a double take – you can do that and you did not spend a fortune on implementing it? No, you don't have to spend a fortune. A site like this including the full power web based site administrator would run somewhere near $5,000 plus or minus depending on implemented features.
As I do with all projects, I estimate time needed to complete it and then give my customers a fixed rate offer to keep them confident that no new unauthorised expenses will be added to their budget.
Posted At : 1:13 PM. |
Posted By : cyrill">
