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Project Details

  • Employer: GigaShock, LLC
  • Client: New Home Rewards Realty
  • Date: 2010, 2011
  • Type: Website, CMS, and Blog
  • Teammates: Stephen Krings

Project Tags

The following tags have been assigned:

Media Gallery

The home page of the website. The search box at the top will allow the site visitor to search for a property that matches specific search criteria. The links at the bottom allow the visitor to find listings for properties in specific cities or who were developed by a specific home builder.A page explaining how the visitor can receive a cash back bonus on their new home purchase.Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) page.A list of articles appropriate for first-time home buyers.
The site includes several interactive mortgage calculator that the user can use to do common calculations.A set of calculators written in JavaScript that allow the site visitors to make common calculations about a hypothetical mortgage and the associated principal and interest payments.A simple JavaScript calculator which helps the site's visitor calculate the payment that would be required on a hypothetical mortgage.An informational page about getting qualified for a loan and a list of partner lenders.
An informational page about the company, it's agents, and it's philanthropic efforts.An example search results page based on a search for specific criteria.A detailed description of a specific property. This page includes a photo gallery, pricing and factual information about the property, and a map including a listing of nearby attractions.A special contact form that lets the site operators know that a visitor has indicated an interest in visiting and potentially purchasing a property.
If a visitor is interested in getting the cash back offer for a property that is not on this site, this form allows them to request that the property or community be eligible for the cash back offer.A form allowing the site visitors to subscribe to emails relating to new properties that satisfy a set of search criteria.An example of a modal dialog listing the locations available for a specific home builder.A page describing several of the master planned communities featured on the site.
A file management feature of the CMS used to associate images with properties and other actions.An admin interface to the CMS listing home builders or developers that have properties listed on the site.A list of specific properties listed on the site as seen from the administrative CMS.The management of a specific property. This page shows many of the custom settings that were included to make it easier for the site operators to indicate the features and facts about a property.
A post made within the separate blog created to drive traffic to the main website.

New Homes Reward Realty

This project was done as part of my work as owner and lead developer with GigaShock, LLC. New Home Rewards Realty was a real estate brokerage firm from Arizona who needed a website where they could advertise their services online as well as manage an accurate and up-to-date listing of homes, condos, and other offerings within master planned communities throughout the state which visitors to the site may have been interested in purchasing. Additionally, they needed a system to track leads and information about potential customers and their interest in real estate purchases. Finally, they also requested that an independent blog be setup on a sub-domain where they would advertise more time-sensitive information to drive traffic to their site.

This project consisted of a full setup and maintenance of the environment including domain name registration as well as provisioning and managing the web server, database server, MySQL database resources, and email accounts associated with this project. In this case we took advantage of the Google Apps service which allows us to provide a hosted email service using Google's Gmail front-end interface as well as a variety of other Google products and services, all branded through this project's domain.

The blog was setup on a sub-domain using an installation of the WordPress blogging platform with only minimal customizations made to the basic installation and available default theme selection. This blog sub-domain was used primarily by the site owners to drive traffic to the main website by including links to the main site during discussions of time-sensitive information or while discussing a specific property or community in even greater detail than is done on the main site.

The visual design for the remainder of the site, it's searching features, home listings, interactive calculators and other content pages were completely custom hand designed in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript based on guidance and input from our client. I created the back-end framework and templating system for the site from scratch in PHP and was able to successfully interact with a custom-made module within the existing content management system (CMS) which was responsible for tracking details about each property, community, and potential customer as well as any media, such as images, that were associated with these entries.

This module was specifically designed to allow the operators of the website to manage very specific details about all of the properties, communities, home builders, and other entities dynamically displayed on the front-end of the website while also allowing them to manage listings of their customers and potential leads privately within an administrative CMS interface. The information input into this CMS allowed users of the website to perform very specific searches and get a listing of properties that accurately matched their search criteria.