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Our lovely new site mods
15th Sep 2009
Hi all,
We've been working on a range of site mods over the last
3 months - it's been a lot of work, and hard going as we've improved many areas of the site. The mods have been tested over couple of weeks and we've put them
live - there are 1 or 2 gremlins still lurking but these mainly concern
browser compatibility.
Anyway, here goes:
1. Search
layouts: after a lot of thought we've changed the summary listing
layout to a single column of properties, instead of 2. We feel it's now
much easier to view them - and we also hope they are better, visually.
We've added some great new functionality - Sort By Price - Pounds,
Euros or Dollars, number of bedrooms or sleeping capacity. We've added
the ability to display 10. 20 or 50 adverts per page, which is really
useful for those on slower connections.
2. Google Map: This is
now bigger and the default Euopean display now shows more of our
property clusters. We've added links at top of map as follows: Search
by List, How to use this map, World view (as we now have quite a few
properties outside of Europe), European view, View these Properties on
a List - this last link is a fantastic addition and we're really happy
with it. Bring up any map area showing clusters / pins and then send
them to a standard list (where they can then be viewed and sorted more
easily).
The reverse is also in place - display a number of
properties in a Country, region or town on the standard list - then
select "View by Map" - which will take you to that mapped area.
3.
SEO - we've made major changes here. Without going into them in detail,
we've corrected all URL's, including each search refinement on the
standard list. We've also ensured that all pages, all searches and
refinements now display correct page titles, descriptions and keywords.
A lot of this is now automated and we've been very careful to use only
ethical SEO. We should see a definite improvement in rank over the next
few months.
4. Site speed: - this has also been improved quite a
bit. We had to make changes to the homepage to get rid of site lag, and
we're still tinkering with a couple of areas, but on the whole we're
happy with it.
Bear in mind we're still ironing out a few bugs but if you spot anything untoward please let us know.
Any comments more than welcome and we hope you like the mods!
Best wishes,
Craig and Liz
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