Published: 16 January 2012.

Contributed by Nick Buick of Refreshweb

While everyone else was taking some time off over the holiday period ThePropertyManager.com.au booked into a swanky day surgery and went under the knife for a bit of much needed nip`n`tuck. The scars have healed and the bandages have come off for the grand reveal… A new, cleaner, neater, faster interface design.

As with any website, layout changes are always a cause for contention with users craving familiarity. The reality is that after 5 years, ThePropertyManager.com.au’s layout was getting long over-due for an update with significant advances in technology and shifting user requirements needing to be accommodated over this period. With ever increasing numbers of MR Brokers advertising their beautiful listings on the website, and many more onsite managers using our site to manage their rental advertising, our main priority was to improve the search system to make it faster and easier to locate any property on the website. Whether you need to find Management Rights, Rental Property, Real Estate, or Hospitality Business, the new search system achieves the impossible by accommodating to all of it while still having fewer fields than before yet being far more specific: It allows the user to type in the beginning of any suburb name and it will auto-complete, it can even account for misspelled suburbs; The user can opt to find listings only within a given suburb, postcode, or within a requested kilometer radius of that location. They can also now set how many manager bedrooms they require, as well as setting their minimum and maximum budgets and even if they need complexes that are pet friendly or not. Making this search form ‘dynamic’ means that users can run very specific searches very easily as they can specify as much or as little information as they require. Needless to say, we have made this enhanced search system the centre-point of the layout around which all the other design is based.

Other feedback we’ve received was from new managers sometimes struggling to add listings to the site, typically due to not providing the correct information in the form fields (the usual suspects were invalid information, or forgetting to add required information such as to give their listings a headline, or forgetting where they saved their images on their hard drive). We completely rebuilt the listing creation forms with better error checking. We split the form into pages reducing the number of questions on the screen at one time to make it easier for managers to see if they’d missed a question. We also added realtime error checking so if you make a mistake filling out a listing now the form lets you know right away, rather than waiting for an error notification email as before. Managers can also save all their complex photos in a single location on the site to save them having to upload photos from their hard drive each time. These changes make adding listings to the site incredibly fast and easy. In fact in our testing we found it is now possible to create a brand new listing on the site in under 1 minute. That’s a rental property advertised on over 10 leading rental websites around the country in less than a minute – talk about ‘gone in 60 seconds’.

Finally we wanted to make better use of space on the page to keep up with the larger sized monitors that are now standard among users... Screens were a lot smaller five years ago than today. So we widened the overall minimum page size, we increased the size of company logos on all marketing and used larger fonts so it was easier for people to read on the screen. We also segregated search, navigation and login areas from the page content using solid colour and moved the my account, login and join-now sections to the very top of the page is has now become standard on most major social network and portal websites.

As with any major rebuild, there’s still some small teething problems we’re working through, but the new layout is a vast improvement on the previous site and we know it will allow us to continue to grow the site through 2012 and beyond. If you have any feedback, good or bad, please let us know so we can continue to improve. Thanks for your support and we wish you all the best in 2012!

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