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http://haslams.net

Give us some background on some of the members of your team and the company that you work for.

Nine Four is a small agency with big ambitions working here in the UK. We relish the opportunity to work with SMBs to deliver business led solutions that embrace a variety of digital mediums; from email campaigns and one page websites through to large scale content managed sites and bespoke web applications. Our team is comprised of two hybrid designer/developers; Nathan Pitman and Paul Cripps.

Tell us about the site. What vision were you trying to fill for the client?

Haslams, like many Estate Agents here in the UK were stuck with a website that piggy backed off a set of pre-defined property listing templates that were spat out by the desktop based property management applications they used. Eager to drag their website kicking and screaming into the present and beyond we consulted with them over a period of time to advise on how we could improve their online presence.

We needed to create a platform on which we could deliver a fresh new website with ‘integrated’ property listings and then build on that over time to add new features and refine the user experience. We also needed to streamline the content management process to make keeping the website up to date as effortless as possible.

Right now we’re still working with Haslams in an ongoing project to refine and improve the site - having recently rolled out a revised home page design (Q4 2010) we’re soon going to be looking at a complete refresh of the property listing and detail pages (Q1 2011).

Was there a specific reason why EE was chosen for this project? Why?

We’ve used ExpressionEngine a great deal in the past so it’s a platform we’re very familiar with. In this instance it provided basic membership functionality (register, log-in etc) at a low cost which otherwise would have been written using a framework like CodeIgniter. The ‘bespoke’ development that was required was fairly focused so it seemed to make sense to go with an established platform that we could add bespoke functionality to rather than write the entire system from the ground up.

What add-ons were used? and why?

The key feature of the Haslams website is of course the properties they sell and let. Haslams found a company that provided a web based property management application called Aspasia and this provided us with an API that we could use to extract property data. We developed a bespoke module called ‘House Fetch’ which grabs data through the Aspasia API on a nightly basis and saves it to the server in an XML format, this data is then parsed by the module and spat into the ExpressionEngine database as a regular weblog/channel entry. These entries use categories to denote property type, status etc and have numerous custom fields to hold the various bits of data (Price, Postcode, Latitude, Longitude etc).

Having the data stored in a weblog/channel means that we’re pretty much free to do with it as we wish. We’ve been able to create an interactive Google Map on the home page that clearly shows the geography of the area which Haslams work in and have complete flexibility in how we output data on property detail pages and elsewhere. With the ‘House Fetch’ module we can now leverage the value in numerous existing ExpressionEngine add ons to quickly and cost effectively add features to the website.

Part of the website allows users to register as ‘members’, here we use the Solspace User Module to make member registration and profile management easier to control and have also utilised the Solspace Favorites Module to provide a property shortlist facility. Elsewhere the Solspace Freeform module is used to handle enquiry forms.

What difficulties did you encounter? How did you address them? Was there a particular add-on that got you out of a bind?

The key issue we faced with this site was load times on the home page. The initial design had a slightly taller map and we were also loading all the property data for the markers at the same time as the rest of the page. Obviously this proved crippling so we re-engineered the map to load the property data asynchronously and used the ImageSizer plug-in to re-size and cache thumbnail images on the server at a more appropriate resolution. We also used the SL Combinator plug-in from Experience Internet to minify JavaScript and CSS. Finally we enabled GZIP compression and added some template tag caching - this significantly improved the home page experience.

Other Add-ons

House Fetch (Bespoke Module)

Company: Nine Four Ltd

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