Web Design Project - Antons Estate Agents

Antons Estate Agents

I completed a site review for this client with a view of bringing it into alignment with W3C standards. I was given full control of the project management, design and development of the project.

My main goal to improve this site was to make it more usable & accessible to its users. I have tried to keep most user actions to under 2 clicks of a mouse button except for performing searches on the frontpage which take 4! I also wanted to improve its appearence on the web so with SEO techniques in mind during the design stage, the website is very SEO friendly and all pages have clean URLs. I used .htaccess for rewriting all requests. All pages are optimised to the maximum without spamming or breaking search engine guidelines.

The website contains a custom built CMS to allow easy management of the site for the staff members.

I also developed a desktop notification tool called Antons Property Notifier. I created this Microsoft Windows based program to deliver property notifications direct to the desktop of a user when a new property is added to the Antons Estate Agency website.

The small application is extremely powerful and flexible. A quick installation is all that is required by the user. Once installed the notification tool runs in the background and does not cause any additional memory usage to a users PC.

In addition, the notification tool keeps a record of the most recent properties that have been added to the website and once the user has been informed, waits for the next new property to be added before alerting the user again.

I used object oriented Java with the XML-RPC protocol for communicating back and forth to the web server. The program also makes use of the system tray features which comes with the JDK 6 to display balloon messages. I also packaged the program as an MSI distribution. Total development time took just under 7 hours.