Our largest work is a real estate portal for Ukrainian real estate market:
http://vukraine.com/
Project Story
After performing market research back in 2007, we’ve found out that this niche was really hot in Ukraine and had a lot of demand from advertisers.
There was a rather strong competition on this market, but all competitors had problems in usability, design, functionality and SEO optimization, so we’ve decided to launch a website which would surpass the competition with good look and feel, innovative ideas, functionality and features, and high degree of SEO optimization.
Our goal was to create a truly unique, highly technological and high-quality information exchange platform for Ukraine real estate market, which would lead Ukrainian market, allow the sellers to reach the buyers, and allow the buyers to find the most suitable offer among thousands of real estate classifieds.
It took us 7 months to release the first public beta, including: planning phase, software architecture, development of the technology, and preparations of the design and site frontend.
Ukraine Real Estate was born and released to the internet on July 18th, 2008. We were really happy with the results, as we’ve managed to achieve all goals set when planning the project.
Since the initial beta release, we’ve released two major updates:
September 2009:
A HUGE update which added:
- Communication and socialization to the project;
- Q&A system which allowed visitors to ask questions about real estate and get answers from top real estate PRO’s;
- Personal blogging system which allowed real estate PRO’s and companies to publish their own blogs on the portal;
- Private messaging system which highly increased the number of leads the real estate listings generated;
- Brand new and fresh design;
- And the most important and innovative part: Ukraine Real Estate PROs Rating – a system that takes hundreds of factors into consideration and provides a complex, but incredibly accurate nationwide rating of real estate professionals. We were the first to provide this kind of information to global audience and quickly became #1 destination for people looking to find a real estate PRO in their area.
The update also featured a number of improvements to data presentation, usability and allowed real estate PRO’s to generate more leads from their online presence.
May 2010:
While the project grew and the amount of loyal audience increased, we’ve been developing a set of ways of generating income from the project. We have released 3 paid membership plans and real estate listing promotion features and started generating income.
September 2010:
An agreement has been reached with payment processing company “OSMP”, which now allows site users to refill balance in cash by using any of 40 thousands street payment terminals available across the country.
October 2010:
First nationwide conference of Ukraine Real Estate portal users has been held in Yalta, Crimea.
Ukraine Real Estate Club was formed and Tim Rogovets elected as club President.
Project Technology
Some of the current features were added after the initial release (i.e. the news engine, the forum, Google maps integration, video upload through Youtube api and dynamic sitemap generator in Google sitemap XML format).
This project is in Russian language only, so we’re going to give you a brief description of the functionality.
- The technology is based on CodeIgniter php framework and PostgreSQL database engine (which makes it extremely fast). Memcached data caching is built-in. Jquery is used for JS effects and Ajax.
- The choice of CodeIgniter as our main technological platform has given us the flexibility we needed while keeping the high load speed and minimum use of server resources;
- Additionally, we have developed two custom libraries to extend it with highly important features:
“Layout” library to allow making use of powers of modular features within MVC architecture,
And “Former” library to handle the process of Forms submission and Validation.
- Additionally, we have developed two custom libraries to extend it with highly important features:
- Real estate listings submission, searching, viewing, bookmarking;
- Smart SEO-friendly URLs for both “List” and “View” pages of properties;
- The system is able to hold the geography of any country, including: states, regions, cities and city areas. So – anyone can publish a classified to a certain city, or to a certain region, or to a certain city area.
- The classifieds have built-in support of various options and media, including: object plan, object photos, video (through YouTube API integration), Google Maps (through Google maps API). You can see samples of some nice classifieds published by our users:
Home for Sale in Alushta
Home for Sale in Yalta
- Map-based search of real estate listings (via Google maps API);
- The classifieds search system is extremely smart and has a lot of built-in search options.
- All classifieds are broadcasted via RSS feeds and regular E-mail subscriptions.
- Users can even subscribe to filtered results (i.e. if they want an RSS feed of real estate objects of certain city area on a certain street within certain price range – they can easily subscribe to such a feed).
- Super-fast http server Nginx is used to significantly decrease the load on server resources.
- Private Messaging with attachments feature;
- Live chat and conferencing features;
- Smart Mortgage Calculator with a variety of options;
- GeoIP detection and targeted listings display;
- Extremely complex and smart user reputation and rating system (to provide nationwide rating of Real estate PRO’s);
- Blogging system to allow Real estate PRO’s to run their own blogs;
- Dynamic 2nd level domains are created for real estate PRO’s public profiles, i.e.: http://realtorkh.vukraine.com.ua/
- The technology is integrated with Drupal CMS to handle news blog functionality (http://vukraine.com.ua/news/), and with phpBB to run the forums (http://vukraine.com.ua/forum/).
- The technology and xhtml code are done with very, very strong SEO in mind:
- All the needed keywords are carefully translated to pages titles and h1 / h2 headings – for every page of the listing, and every page of a classified.
- All URL’s are SEO-friendly and contain keywords, like this:
http://vukraine.com.ua/sale/flat/odesskaya/odessa/primorskiy - “View Listing” URL’s contain most important keywords
- Xml sitemaps for Google and other search engines are dynamically generated.
- All that results in thousands of pages being indexed by search engines and high search engine traffic.
- Admin backend allows to do all the needed things.
- User balance system allows users to refill their balance and spend it on paid memberships and features;
- Balance system is integrated with local Paypal-like payment processing systems;
- Our in-house ad management software is built-in, which allows to run contextual and highly targeted ads, including Geo IP targeting, contextual and behavioral advertising.
We’re running this portal as a part of our business and with 10k+ active members, it’s become one of the largest in Ukrainian real estate industry.
Project Awards
Ukraine Real Estate is nominated in two highly rated Internet awards of 2008: WebHiTech as best consumer characteristics and UA Webstar 2008 as best niche website.
Web design and print materials samples
