real estate web site - Overview List - Any good Idea ??

Dear all,

This is quite an old thread I'm digging up, however, I'm in more or less the same position as the OP:

I have already designed and build my complete real estate website. The last thing to add now are the actual listings. I already started doing those by just listing them on a page in Xara WD and then gave each object a 'learn more' button for to link to another page with more detailed info. However, I have come to the conclusion that it is very time consuming making updates to the listing as I will have to move everything by hand if I want to add or delete one item. And it is easy to mess up as well, especially if you take in consideration that I would like my employees to update the listings as well. Final remark is the lack of a search engine. My former webpage did not have this either but the diversity of the listings is growing and I would like to be prepared for the future if our portfolio expands.

My current 'quick' solution is to put the listings in excell and simply save that file as an html page and upload it. My Xara website links to that (not so nice) html page and all the listings are shown with a 'learn more' link back to the detailed project page on the Xara website. For the time being this works, yet still without a search engine.

So, a solution needs to be found imho. I am not going to throw away all the hours of work of my webpage so I prefer linking my Xara website to a database, which on its turn links back to the 'detailed' page of each property on my Xara website. The time pressure is starting to get bigger as I aimed at a compleat 'site renewal' at new years day (to have an easy milestone also in combination with new e-mail adresses ecc.). I've already checked out Joomla once but it appeared pretty complex at first glance and, since it is for my listings only, I obviously prefer something I do not have to 'learn'.

I hope that in the meantime (the OP asked this question 5 years ago!) somebody has come up with a great solutions?

Edit: I've found this thread where-in is spoken about a $400 database program which can be embedded into Xara. I'm not afraid to pay money, though have to be sure that it will work? /Edit

Kind regards,
Christian

Christian, where is your Xara built website?

Currently not yet online. Would that be of a lot of help? I will have to make sure that I've got enough space to upload it 'next to' my current website before I upload it as well, you see? Plus, since it is a rather large website I have built it in, lets say, multiple websites. So a big part of the links do not work yet cause they link to an actual http adress, rather than to another file.

Is there anything particular you would like to know? Maybe I can already answer it straight away....?

I will check if I can upload it.

I was curious about what your site looked like and what the HTMLified spreadsheet looked like. No worries.

Paul

Nothing special. Just like a table any other html editor could make (Frontpage back in the days f.e.)

But no solutions to my problem?

Plenty of solutions, particularly if you don't use Xara and spend money on it.

I would make a non-Xara web page styled to match the Xara part and link that to a CMS of some sort, or you could automated the Excel file to be a similarly styled page as Xara.

You are very shy of actually showing us what you have done. Linking to a crude HTML table is a pretty poor idea.

That's because I've had issues in the past when uploading a new website for testing it while keeping the old one online as well. For some mysterious reason the old one started showing issues and it took hours and hours to resolve it. Since the business is higly dependent on the website I try to minimise the risk of it going off-line by doing a 'complete-one-time-transfer' (replacing the old one in one time). Anyway, since you show particulair interest in my excel file: here it is. Theimages (a bunch of mooses for the moment...) loose their quality. Don't know why.

A partition of the new website is here. By clicking on one of the four types of properties (new built chalets, apartments, resales or commercial) a listing page of that typology is shown. Unfortunately I will have to replace that page with the excel page.

Thanks. I can see that you've been working hard.

I thought at first you could probably restyle the excel part, but I think this whole thing is a bit of a maintenance nightmare, particularly now that I've seen it. I would think that it really calls out for a dedicated solution using a CMS.

There are a lot of spelling mistakes and occassional odd sentences.

Thanks for letting me see it.

Hi Pauland,

Thanks for your reply. I have found a new (temporary) solution. I will use an iframe on the listings page which is linked to the excel-html page. Therefore one will see the excel table without leaving the site. Maintenance is relatively easy as I will only have to update the excel file and upload it. Therefore no maintenance has to be done on the actual Xara website. Please see a tryout of what I mean over here.

In the future, the iframe maybe could be linked to a proper database. I have been looking into various cms programs yesterday but I have to admit that I, for the moment at least, really can not be bothered learning a complete new program again. What I would like to is something similair to excel. No advanced customer relation trackers ecc. Just my listings in a clear overview with a search ability (location, type of property, number of bedrooms, budget). If you have got a suggestion it is more than welcome. In the meantime I'll continue with the excel file and do some research in between.

Yes, a lot of work has been put into the website. English is indeed not my mother tongue. The textual part of the website has not been the primary focus for the last couple of months. I did not knew however it was as bad as you described. I will let a native look into it. Tnx.

I think the problem with the iFrame will be over-running the page footer.

The spelling is generally good - better than many whose first language is English would do. Unfortunately people pick up the mistakes, not the things that are right!

Luxory should be Luxury. "New built apartments" would be newly built apartments, same for chalets. Services has a "servicese" on the page. "one of the most attractive country in the world" - one of the most attractive countries in the world.

That's not an exhaustive list!

You've done a great job, but using a native English speaker used to writing copy, would just catch these simple errors (though beware, there are some native English speakers who can't spell or write well).

Good luck!

Paul