Displet

We’re in the process of increasing our resources and diversifying to Amazon’s suite of Cloud products.  Yesterday, we rolled out a system change so that we’re now storing all images on Amazon S3.  As a result, the images are in the process of uploading, so many properties do not have thumbnail images.  As is always the case, when a user clicks through to the property detail page, the images will load automatically with Ajax.  We’re sorry for the inconvenience, but feel that the additional resources will pay off very nicely in the long run.

We pushed MetroLivingRealtors.com a few weeks ago, but have yet to brag on Chris Jacob’s new site.  He wanted a color scheme that incorporates UT orange, but “not too orange.”  MetroLivingRealtors has a pretty sweet home page quick search (you can actually do most of your searching just from the home page) and a very nice featured listings scroller.  Take a look and let us know what you think!

We’re proud to finally unveil the new Displet.com!  Displet.com is a custom WordPress theme created with a number of plugins (that we’ve written, and that we’re happily borrowing.)  Check it out and let us know what you think!

One of the coolest things about working on a project like Displet is rolling out new features, and seeing fairly dramatic performance gains.  I’m happy to report our latest revision, dubbed “Liquid Swords,” has produced some pretty nice results:

Speed Gains: We’ve known that our search was a bit on the slow side, so we front burnered speed about 2 months ago.  Because fresh ideas are always a good thing, we brought in a third party consultant to take a look at our code base.  Marcus did a killer job & identified a bottleneck that we subsequently fixed.  On our latest revision, we cut down load time by more than 50%.  We knew this was a noticeable gain when people, well, noticed.  We’ve received more than a few unprompted emails saying “Looks like you guys sped up the system!”

Login Light Window Revision: We recommend that our clients ask for registration as soon as a visitor attempts to view property details.  In the past, if a visitor clicked on a property detail, the light window immediately launched.  Now, if they click on a property detail, the detail page loads first & the light window launches on top of it.  This way, the visitor sees that, yes, there are plenty of goodies behind the light window, so they are more apt to enter their information.  Check it out here: http://demo.displet.com/residentials/detail/117036

Property Detail Page Customization: We’ve always been able to control styles on every page, but we can now control elements on the property detail page (as well as the tool bar.)  These are first in a line of making every element on every page customizable – similar in function to WordPress.  What prompted this was a NY agent asking why they needed to display “Pool: Y/N” when no properties in NY have pools…which is a very valid question.  This feature will also allow us to easily add elements to the property detail page.  I think it’s nice, for instance, to include area amenities & tax information.  Now you can!  (Please note that this will require basic HTML knowledge.)

There were a few more features we’ve added that I won’t go into here (mostly under the hood,) but it’s safe to say that we’re very pleased with this revision!

~Eric & Braxton

Eric and his team at Displet have been nothing short of spectacular. From the beginning, Displet worked to tailor their real estate search to my WordPress website by providing fast, high quality design work that makes the search look like it was made exclusively for my site. Best of all, my website’s traffic has been up since using Displet with their real estate search product bringing in over 800 new and repeat visitors! — Joshua Ferris | HouseMeetsOwner.com