South African Property Listing Web Site

The concept behind the site is to provide free property listings for estate agents and private sellers with revenue being earned through paid advertising on the pages of the site.

Warren Eades from TopProp has quite a bit of experience in print design and he was responsible for developing and tweaking the look of the site. Early on in the development cycle it was decided to reduce the amount of scrolling required by the surfer by keeping the site within the default size of the browser screen. To enable enough properties to be displayed on each page without the need to scroll down it meant that the properties could not be displayed vertically as is the case in most property listing sites. Instead it was decided to display the property listings in a 3x4 matrix across and down the page which makes for quick scanning through of the listings by the surfer. Basic info about each listing was placed into drop down layers attached to each listing that would be displayed on mouseover of the listing image. This system works very well and is particularly suited to property listings as most people will first be attracted to a property by the look.

Ajax was used for the search system to impliment a quick response realtime feedback of the number of properties matching the search criteria before the surfer is actually taken to the search results. This greatly reduces the amount of page reloads required in order for the surfer to select their desired search criteria.

The site includes a powerfull admin back end system to enable new users to signup and manage their property listings.

Ajax user contact forms with CAPTCHA were also implimented to eliminate automatically generated spam from being sent from the site to users.

Automated uploading, cropping and resizing of images with online cropping preview were also implimented on the site.