http://www.lotterygold.com/ This was an interesting and very large project that recently went live. The application we created for this site is general purpose and can support many types of e-commerce. The backend of this site is very comprehensive and highly automated. Due to its sensitive nature, the there are multiple layers of security and a dedicated audit trail facility.

http://www.mountainhighoutfitters.com/ This site is based on our very comprehensive and sophisticated online store engine. Our client’s goal is to compete head on with the likes of rei.com (who probably have spent hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars on their online store). We have a very full featured marketing capabilities, integrated product catalog management (with lots of JavaScript to make it friendly and easy to use), integrated order fulfillment and automated integration with in-house store inventory. Since Google is the source of so much traffic (both paid and non-paid), we support every service that Google offers: Google Base (a.k.a. Google Products and Froogle), Google Site Maps, Google Adwords, Google Checkout and Google Analytics. We have some interesting payment solutions for vendors that want to sell to non-traditional markets (overseas). All our web applications support our standard skin and content management system (see below), so just about any look and feel can be created without any programming or database changes. There is a lot of power and flexibility under the hood that is probably best demonstrated in a meeting.

http://www.hudhomeschattanooga.com/ This is a standard ListingsTech site to market HUD homes in the metro Chattanooga, TN area. One interesting thing about this project is that we allow visitors to search across subsets of two different listings databases. We needed to do this because the databases contain all HUD listings for Georgia and Tennessee, but the site is only for Chattanooga. Another interesting idea here is the general approach of keeping the site as simple as possible – we are trying to get visitors to the information or service they want in as few clicks as possible… Want to see listings for Walker County? Click the search term on the left. Need to get prequalified for a loan? Click the link on the top of the page and fill out the form. Need more information about a listing? Click the “Contact Us for More Info” link and type your question.  

• 3 Car Garage
• Horses Allowed
• Kitchen Island
• Private Pool
• and RV Parking

I can run searches like this all day long on ListingsTech web sites. Not only can I run searches like this, but, as a potential buyer, I can register to have the web site notify me via email when new houses are added to the database that match this search criteria.

We just finished a major upgrade to the ListingsTech engine. In conjunction with the upgrade, we added support for Arizona’s ARMLS MLS and Vermont’s VREIN MLS along with two new customer web sites:

• http://www.billmagnus.com/
• http://www.flagrealtygroup.com/

The ListingsTech engine upgrade includes several enhancements to the ListingsTech engine:

First, we’ve made extensive performance and browser compatibility enhancements to the default search results template. Here are some examples: http://www.billmagnus.com/searches/singlefamily.html and  http://www.flagrealtygroup.com/searches/singlefamily.html. Try viewing 50 or 100 results per page to watch the photos load incrementally – this takes some carefully crafted HTML on IE. Try resizing your browser window to see how many thumbnails you can fit. Getting this effect to work correctly on both IE and FireFox requires a small bit of browser specific JavaScript, but I think the end result is worth it. Most people won’t notice, but on IE I had to slightly degrade the drop shadow effect. On IE, I was using a CSS filter to create the drop shadow (see http://www.alistapart.com/articles/cssdrop2/). The effect was very nice, but it was killing page rendering times. Moving z-index calculations (see http://www.aplus.co.yu/css/z-pos/) from JavaScript into the engine also gave a small boost to the IE rendering performance. Finally, I added some carefully crafted database indexes to keep search results coming up fast for the most common searches.

For most MLSs, we have to download the listing images along with the listing data. We typically only get “full size” photos for each listing. We generate the listing thumbnails on the fly on the web server. I experimented with several different algorithms to get the ideal combination of image quality, web server CPU usage and image size. You see the results in the default search results template.

Next, click on a listing thumbnail to see an individual listing page (say, for example, http://www.billmagnus.com/listings/9936125-158557.html or http://www.flagrealtygroup.com/listings/2690439-170865.html). Here you can see the next group of enhancements. First and most obvious for those with monitors bigger than 1024×768, the default listing template has been enhanced with a new flow layout that allows the thumbnails to go into more than one column. Again, careful attention to the HTML allows IE to show the main page, then incrementally download the listing photos. By popular request, maps have been enhanced with the addition of a pushpin that indicates the listing’s location on the map. Finally, towards the bottom of the page, you’ll see the first part of our extensive support for listing “features”. Each MLS has a unique set of features that are allowed for a listing. We import all this detail and (subject to the customer’s preferences) show it on both listing pages and print listing pages.

If you click on Search All Listings (http://www.flagrealtygroup.com/searches/ARMLSSearch.aspx), you will see our enhanced search page. On the Quick Search tab, you’ll see a bit of AJAX at work in the City and Zip code fields. On the Power Search tab, you will see more JavaScript and AJAX. I’ve tried really hard to come up with a nice search interface that lets buyers find what they want quickly and easily.

Short list boxes are OK for short lists (see the State and County lists on the Quick Search tab of http://www.billmagnus.com/searches/VREINSearch.aspx), but I don’t like long list boxes that only allow you to jump down based on the first letter of the selection. This can be really frustrating for long lists like City and/or lists with lots of entries with the same first letter like Zip Code. Instead of a simple drop down list, for long lists like City, Zip Code, Subdivision and School Name, I’ve used an AJAX based “auto-complete” field that narrows the list of choices down based on all the characters entered. On the Power Search page, users can enter multiple values separated by semicolons.

Does anybody really like “Ctrl+Click” lists to select multiple items at once? I can’t think of any situation where this UI element is ideal or appropriate. First, the list almost always has to be scrolled - the user can never see all their selections at once. Next, this list shares the problem with drop lists where you can only jump down based on the first letter of the selection. Finally, the “Ctrl+Click” technique is tough to master and merciless if you make a mistake – all your selections will be reset in a blink of of an eye without any way to get them back. To get around these problems, some sites use the old “two list boxes separated by two buttons” setup. This idiom solves some of the problems of the “Ctrl+Click” list, but it’s still not easy to understand. So, on the Power Search tab, I’ve used lists of checkboxes that can be shown or hidden by clicking on the list’s title. The checkbox list offers all the functionality of the “Ctrl+Click” list in a much more user friendly manner – it’s hard to get simpler than a good old checkbox. Normally, I would prefer that all the checkboxes be visible from the start. Having to click on the list’s title adds a step to the search process. But, in this case, I’m hiding most of the choices by default. Most users will only be interested in a few of the search options and hiding everything but the list titles by default lets users quickly choose which lists they need. Once you drop a list down, the search page remembers the “list open” state when you return.

If you go to the Power Search tab and set the Search Type to “Single Family”, you’ll see the relevant feature selections at the bottom that let me search for features like “3 Car Garage” and “Kitchen Island”. This list of features varies by MLS. We map all MLS features into a common set (so we can run cross-MLS searches), but the MLS specific search page only shows features that are valid for the MLS and listing type.

Integrating maps with searching is old news at ListingsTech, but is is worth mentioning that the format used on our search pages makes it straightforward to add support for map based searches. Here is an example: http://www.georgiamountainhigh.com/searches/NEGCTIMLSSearch.aspx (click View County Map). The hard part is getting the actual map graphics and accompanying image maps created. We have some ideas for automating the creation of maps and, as we continue to enhance the core engine, map based searching is an area you can expect to see us to improve.

As always, there is a lot of additional functionality “under the hood”. For example, on the Flag Realty Group site, we added a custom database search features and lead management and tracking system. In fact, for Flag Realty Group, the back-end system is more important than the public facing web site.

The NAR show went well. We were pleased with the good list of sales leads we left with. We spent a lot more hours on the show floor than for a SEC or Exemplar Setup Toolkit trade show. Friday was 3 hours, Saturday and Sunday had 7 hours each and Monday was 5 hours. The long hours were good and bad. For the style of consultative sales we are doing, it worked out well because I had time to spend with each customer. I was talking with sales leads for almost all hours of the show. The bad part was we didn’t have much time to spend in New Orleans. Other than some nice dinners, Laurie didn’t go out at all. Robert and I went out to hear some bands and see a friend of his Saturday night. We were out late. Sunday morning started out rough!

After getting some good response on Saturday, I thought Sunday and Monday for sure would be slow. Saturday was the busiest day, but we got good leads on Sunday and Monday, too. I got a really good lead Monday right as the show was about to close.

Monday, with Robert in charge of our booth, I left to check out some of the other booths. There are competitors out there, but nobody has the template driven system that we use for ListingsTech. A highlight (for me) happened when I went looking for the booth of my biggest local Atlanta competitor. In the exhibitor list, it showed that this company had a booth. I even saw their booth going up while we were moving in. But, when I went to “spy” on Monday, their booth was gone (as if it never existed). Laurie and I guessed they had moved. Their location was bad. Laurie asked around and found out that they had packed up and left the show entirely the day before! Another fun thing happened when Laurie and I stopped by the Google Maps booth. They were showing some real estate sites, but I noticed that the sites they were showing didn’t actually integrate Google Maps. The presenter had to flip to from the demo web site to a GUI program to show what the web site integration “could” look like. I showed a Google rep one of my web sites that actually integrated Google maps and suggested maybe they could use my site for their demos. The rep looked suitably impressed and asked if it would be OK if somebody from Google contacted me later.Another fun thing happened when Laurie and I stopped by the Google Maps booth. They were showing some real estate sites, but I noticed that the sites they were showing didn’t actually integrate Google Maps. The presenter had to flip to from the demo web site to a GUI program to show what the web site integration “could” look like. I showed a Google rep one of my web sites that actually integrated Google maps and suggested maybe they could use my site for their demos. The rep looked suitably impressed and asked if it would be OK if somebody from Google contacted me later.The “budget booth” I created worked well. We had a full color, 10′x2′, $200 sign I had printed at Kinko’s. It came out looking great and it let people passing by know right away what we did (“Real Estate Websites”). Quite a few people stopped, looked at the sign, then started talking to us. At the last minute, I built a pair of bar height tables out of plywood and we bought some bar stools from Wal-Mart. We draped the tables with some inexpensive fabric. On each table, I put a 20″ LCD monitor, our keyboard and mouse and sales literature and props. The bar stools came in handy when sales consultations got long. This inexpensive furniture worked well. It was wasn’t as polished as real trade show furniture, but it was lots, lots less expensive, matched our selling style and ultimately served the purpose.