Real Estate TV
Developed in partnership with Londonthing, Real Estate TV is a property finder service allowing customers to find their dream UK or overseas property.Designed to complement the Real Estate TV channel on Freeview and Sky, the website offers property news and information, as well as mortgage and financial guides.
Objective
Design and maintain PHP-based components necessary to update specific areas of the website.Based on client requirements, the components should be able fit seamlessly into the current design, as well as adhering strictly to visual designs approved by Real Estate TV. In some cases, the components should be able to manipulate XML feeds from external sources and deliver content appropriately.
Technologies Used
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Plus Points
- TV Schedule
The Real Estate TV website was a daunting task with complex MySQL queries, but it turned out to be extremely gratifying, more secure than I hoped and probably my most satisfying achievement to date.
The Now and Next banner, which accompanies the TV Schedule and runs on almost every page, was very challenging and initially ran with errors, but they were resolved and it has proved to be a very efficient script.
The MySQL query was a particular hurdle, as I wanted to avoid using LIMIT to improve performance, but I managed to create a script that pulls only the current and next TV show.
Minus Points
- Search engine friendly pages
This was something that was never really overcome and being able to implement a solution was one regret I had when leaving the Real Estate TV project.
The pages went some way to becoming more search engine friendly, with improvements to meta data generated from dynamic pages and more efficient keywords, and the process gave me a better understanding of how design and word usages can help improve a web page's standing in the rankings.
There were, however, still a number of areas that let the Real Estate TV website down, particularly the lack of friendly URLs and the order in which content was placed in the page source. - Performance
Loading speeds were frequently a problem due to the shear amount of data that needed to be processed. This was partly due to my inexperience with dealing with large websites and understanding how separate components can influence the website as a whole.
If I had the opportunity to work on a similiar project, I would start by mapping how all the components relate to each other and what elements make up the website. This would allow me to see where, in this instance, performance could be a problem, as well as giving the client a clear picture of what they have.