Displet

We just rolled out a new light window, which looks like it’s already increased conversion a bit. The new light window accommodates our Facebook login feature, which is super cool. Facebook login allows users to register or login to your site using their FB credentials. Since most people are logged into Facebook whenever they’re online, this allows them to register or login to your site with a couple of clicks, rather than requiring them to fill out a number of fields. To our knowledge, we’re the only RETS / IDX provider that has this feature. It’s automatically rolled out to our Displet Pro & OnDisplet clients.

To test drive this feature from the visitor’s perspective, check out Stuart St. James implementation (click through to a detail page to login.)

To enable Facebook login, you will need to go through a few steps. It can seem a bit intimidating, but the process is actually relatively easy. Here’s a tutorial on enabling the feature. As always, if anyone has any questions, please contact support and we’ll help you through it.

We developed the Phone Number Reminder in anticipation of Facebook login, but it works well for another reason, as well. Phone Number Reminder, well, reminds a user (without a phone number in their profile) that it would be a good idea for them to add the number to their profile, and you can give them any reason you would like, because the message is customizable. We’ve noticed that if you require phone number at registration, many people supply bogus numbers. By “reminding” them for the number every so often, it allows you to show them how valuable your site is (by sending property suggestions, allowing them to save searches, & use your other advanced features) they are more likely to provide a legitimate contact number. Anyways, here’s a quick rundown on the feature:

Get ready for a nerdy post!

We have now upgraded our code base & framework to Ruby 1.9.2 and Rails 3.0.3, respectively. This is a fairly large “behind the scenes” improvement and will result in some pretty nice gains on a couple of fronts. First, we should see a reduction in page load time as Rails 3 and Ruby 1.9 are considerably faster. Second, we’ve greatly expanded our cucumber test suite to help us manage bugs. Testing is a great concept heavily utilized in agile development projects (we’re an agile shop.) Code testing slows down code development slightly, but speeds up the project overall. Any time we fix a bug, we write a test for that bug. When we develop new code, we run our suite of tests to ensure that no past bugs have resurfaced. So, in theory, when we fix a bug, it’s the last time our end users will ever see it.

We’re pretty excited that these upgrades are rolled out. We have a backlog of bug fixes & features that have yet to be deployed. Now that this upgrade is deployed, our users will enjoy a short period of extremely rapid development followed by an even stabler system.

We just rolled out another set of bugfixes & enhancements. We received quite a bit of feedback that our thumbnail image resolution was too low. While this helped the images load quickly, they looked a little fuzzy. We’ve now doubled the size of all thumbnail images on import so you’ll see all new thumbnail images coming in with much better resolution.

For those that require registration after a certain number of property detail views, we’ve removed the X out from the login/registration page. In the past, the X was visible, but disabled. We’ve now removed it so there’s no confusion – visitors do not have the option to close the box. Hopefully this will result in a better conversion rate for that light window.

We modified the keyword search field to query more fields. In addition to agent remarks & subdivision, keyword also now queries mls_number, street_name,
street_address, zip, property_type, & view. This will allow third party developers to create some cool quick searches & is also more intuitive for the end user.

Beyond these visible fixes, we had a number of “under the hood” fixes that aren’t readily apparent, but which keep the application lean and mean.

This one was a real pain to debug, but we finally took care of it. Any new images imported from May 6 forward will not have the nasty “gray bar” on the bottom. We’re doubling the resolution of thumbnail images next so that they will look nicer when pulled in from the xml feed and resized.

We rolled out another revision late last night that dealt predominantly with bugfixes & included a pretty big improvement to geocoding. Here’s a run down of what’s been addressed:

• Gated Commuity search field fixed.
• Added Unit # to results row on map search page.
• “City” field is now an exact match field. In the past, if you searched for “Hampton” it would return “North Hampton”, “South Hampton”, etc… Now if you search for “Hampton” it looks only for the exact match.
• When agents/admins create a new user, the assignation feature is fixed. Previously, the assignation set at this point was overridden by the duty agent.
• Address prefix display on map search is now correct. “N Augusta” was mashing up to “NAugusta”. This is fixed.
• GMLS geocoding issue fixed.
• Reset password function fixed.
• We now use Google’s biasing feature when geocoding making the results much more accurate.
• We made a change to property comparison when importing that has reduced errors considerably.

Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns over any of these bugfixes or improvements!

In the past, the registration request options were “Require Registration to View Property Details: Yes or No.” We felt it was nice to allow our clients to experiment with requiring registration at the point a visitor wants to view a property detail page or not.

We received a lot of requests from our clients to make the registration requirement a little more flexible; some clients wanted to allow visitors to view 3 detail pages before asking for registration, some wanted to allow them to view 5 detail pages, some wanted to require registration on the first view, and some wanted to allow visitors to view as many detail screens as they’d like, and never ask for registration. So, we rolled out a new feature that accommodates each request.

Here’s a screenshot of the new admin > site settings screen:

Now a site owner can choose how many public views they will allow a visitor before requiring registration. If you want the registration light box to pop up on the 3rd view, then enter “2″. If you want the light box to pop up on the 1st view, then enter “0″. If you would like to allow unlimited property detail views, then enter “999″.

This feature works by setting a cookie in the visitors browser that is good for 24 hours. So, if a visitor looked at your site today and bounced after seeing the registration window, and then revisits your site tomorrow, they will get the same number of public views.

We just rolled out an awesome new feature “SEO Friendly URLs.”  Since it’s so important to rank for individual property addresses, and Google takes into account the URL of every page, we thought it would be killer to add the property address to each detail page’s URL.  So…we added the property address to each property detail page’s URL.  If you’re a Displet Pro subscriber, this was added to your account free of charge.  Don’t worry about duplicate content issues – all of the old URLs send a 301 redirect to the new, prettier URLs.

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.

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