Archive for September, 2006
The Building of Property Guide Spain Friday, September 8th, 2006 by Matt
Earlier this year, Marbella real estate consultant, Ben Johnson, of Bright SL, approached MakaluMedia with an innovative idea: to address the lack of high-quality, objective information online, dealing with the various aspects of buying, owning and selling property in Spain. Initially, Ben had considered the idea of simply authoring and publishing a set of articles himself, but then discovered that a unique business idea was lying just beneath the surface.
It occurred to Ben, that most estate agents working in this market would highly value the ability to publish such information on their own websites, especially if the information were available in multiple languages. In addition to providing a valuable, complementary service to their customers, the provision of information in multiple languages would result in an expansion of the potential market.
Considering this, Ben felt that if he could syndicate information to interested agents, he provide a value-added service, while saving them the costs of authoring, translating and publishing. Hence the idea of Property Guide Spain (PGS) was born.
Working with Ben, the following challenges were identified:
There is no standard technology in use by the customer (agency) websites, so the solution should require little to no modification of the customer sites.
The solution should require minimal effort on the part of the customer (agency). This eliminated the option of simply publishing RSS feeds for integration into customer sites.
The solution should somehow promote Bright SL services, in function to the number of syndication customers.
In order to address challenges (1) and (2), we conceived a single publication system, which can generate any number of customer-branded interfaces (instances of the PGS). We engineered and implemented this system using the WordPress CMS, using extensively modified core templates, and custom developed plug-ins.
The resulting system allowed Ben to:
Publish a set of articles, each possibly in more than one language.
Manage (create, modify and remove) syndication customers.
For each new customer created, Ben simply uploads customer-specific branding assets (from within the standard WordPress interface), and immediately the fully customer-branded instance of the PGS becomes available at a customer-specific URL.
For example, view the following two URL (in order):
…and then…
The default instance of the site shows Bright SL property advertisements on each article, while the customer-branded version of the site shows only customer-specific information and branding.
As part of the project, we developed a number of graphical badges which can be integrated into the customer’s own website, linking to their own branded instance of the Property Guide Spain site. This allowed customer-side integration with minimal effort — simply add a graphic image, linking to the customer-specific PGS URL.
Challenge (3) required a lot of thinking, and was solved in a very innovative way. Without going into the technical details, if a visitor arrives to the PGS default URL (non-customer branded) from Google, they are shown the customer-branded site that they specifically visited. Otherwise, the visitor is shown the default PGS layout, which includes property-of-the-month advertisements from Bright SL throughout the site.
In this way, both the customer and Bright SL benefit in a fair and equitable way as the PGS customer base grows.
In the end, this has been a fascinating project, and a huge success for Ben and Bright SL. The project, for MakaluMedia, allowed us the opportunity to showcase what we feel is a unique combination of business consulting and technical solution implementation — by creating for Ben and Bright SL a unique and innovative technical solution, using open-source technology, to solve a brand new business challenge in a highly effective and economical manner.