Case Study: MedSun Villas

Introduction & Original Site Overview

MedSun are an estate agent specialising in overseas property, particularly in Spain and at Polaris World resorts. Prior to the redevelopment of their site they were maintaining three separate property databases: One internal system used for generating brochures and on a day-to-day basis with clients, a second which provided property details on their website and finally a third at RightMove.co.uk, a site that made it possible for the MedSun properties to reach a larger audience.

The Original MedSun Website

Although the existing site did make it possible for potential customers to browse through the available properties, the search feature was only basic and the database contained prices in three separate currencies. This meant that although you could specify a price range of ‘100,000’ to ‘200,000’, for instance, the properties returned could cost 200,000 Euros, 200,000 British pounds or 200,000 Cyprus pounds. This was at best confusing for visitors and at worst providing properties that did not actually match the visitor’s budget.

The site also suffered from a frame-based structure which would have harmed usability and significantly decreased the value of search engine traffic. Visitors arriving from a search engine would not be provided with the all-important navigation links in the header frame so would be left with no navigation option other than the back button in their browser, which would simply return them to the search results where they could click through to a competitor.

The goal of the site redevelopment was to resolve all of these issues whilst also creating an attractive, user-friendly site that increased conversions (in this case, the percentage of visitors who contacted MedSun by phone or email) and had the potential to achieve good search engine rankings over time.

Property Database

Due to the amount of flexibility required of the information in the database we opted to use ExpressionEngine to manage the property database and site itself. A properties ‘weblog’ was created and through the use of EE’s custom fields the database was soon up and running. Of the three pre-existing databases the internal one, a Microsoft Access database, was the most current and the most detailed, so that was then converted to the correct mySQL format for insertion into the ExpressionEngine database tables. Finally the addition of a field-specific file upload script for property images ensured that properties could be added or updated directly through the control panel.