The content of this white paper focuses on how propertykenya.com addresses the needs of professional realtors and modern day Internet users while keeping track of Internet standards and trends.
The Next Generation
Propertykenya.com is truly a next generation real estate website. It supports placement of business rules on the realtors' back-end systems giving them the power and control of what to advertise, when to advertise and for how long. Propertykenya.com design comes intranet-ready presenting the possibility of another model that applies business rules on local intranets enabling realtors to have propertykenya.com functionality on their local area networks.What is PropertyKenya.com?
Propertykenya.com is a Kenyan-developed, fully database-driven real-estate website representing the next generation of Kenya's real estate websites built around, and supported by powerful client/server architecture. It is a product of Synergy's long-standing leadership in cross-platform website, database and software design, development, implementation, and integration. PropertyKenya.com is unique in providing a completely transparent property advertisement infrastructure without the direct knowledge of Internet protocols or website design. It shields realtors from the costs and complexity of technologies requisite to develop and maintain a professional website, by encapsulating modern Internet technologies and website update intricacies into a premier real estate software product, the Ultima™ Property Information System.Database Driven/Dynamic Website
Propertykenya.com relies on an industry-strength SQL-99 compliant commercial database server. Propertykenya.com implements most of its functionality using dynamic pages. What this means is that the content displayed to users does not exists on the server as static files per say. Instead, pages are assembled on the fly, while factoring in a host of variables including business rules from various realtors and the version of the browser making the request (e.g. Explorer or Netscape). This allows the page to be fine-tuned to prevailing Internet conditions.Automated Site Updates
Ultima™ Property Information System automatically updates propertykenya.com with properties from realtors' back-end systems on which it is installed. All the realtor needs to do is enable automatic site updates, then "web-enable" choice properties for advertising on propertykenya.com. As the realtor continues using the software and benefiting from its organizational functionality, the software updates the site accordingly when web-enabled properties change, and when an internet-connection becomes available. Once updated, the property automatically gets an Internet address in the format:http://propertykenya.com/properties/reference/<CODE>Where <CODE> represents the property code on the local system. This address can be used to advertise the property in magazines or given to clients and landlords alike.
Updates are error free and come with a consistency assurance backed by state-of-art technology. The Ultima Software and the propertykenya.com engine implement an automatic, two-phase commit, explicit transaction management paradigm, where the software and the server independently certify that a property transaction over the Internet was indeed successful.
Property-Search Tool
Propertykenya.com successfully implements an unparalleled and unrivaled property-search tool. The property search tool gives Internet users the ability to search for suitable properties using various attributes such as property size (e.g. number of bedrooms), pricing, location, construction type, (e.g. Apartment). What more? Users can also include specific keywords in their search (e.g. Swimming, Leasehold etc). The results are intuitively displayed in a similar fashion to mail items on yahoo or hotmail. Users have total control over the display, in terms of what currencies properties are listed in, how many entries are displayed per page, how entries are sorted (e.g. by date, location etc). From these results, users can view more details of the property, contact the realtor directly by phone or by mail.How easier can searching for properties get?
Page Indexing and The Site-Search Tool
While it is expected that all real estate agents would take advantage of programs such as propertykenya.com or realtorsafrica.com, a one-size-fits-all approach is not practically attainable. Some, realtors have successfully run their own sites and may want to continue to do so. PropertyKenya.com does an exceptional job of amalgamating Kenya's real estate fraternity in cyber space. Here is how:Using innovative search engine technology, Synergy Systems has implemented the regions first real estate web page index, with a catalogue of over 8,000 pages sampled from eight leading Kenyan real estate websites. The ultimate goal is to update this index on a daily basis as opposed to international search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN search engines that update their indexes every 35-40 days.
Premier Kenyan Directory of Real Estate and Allied Industries
PropertyKenya has the largest single-source online real estate directory in Kenya. The directory is open to the public for additional listings. Users, business owners and the general public at large can post their businesses, products and services to any of the over 50 categories and sub-categories. All entries are vetted for relevance to real estateConvenience Tools
Propertykenya.com implements various convenience and productivity tools on site. These include:- Multi-Currency Support
- Property Notification Service
- Mortgage Calculator
- Currency Converter
- Website Rating Tool
- Content Co-branding
- Sitemap with Page counters, Article posting, etc.
Users on propertykenya.com have access to online help on each page. The help provided is a systematic guide on how to effectively use the features of the given page. The help presentation is such that users are able to cross-reference between the help page and the page for which they sought help. This does not preclude the fact that propertykenya.com offers an extremely easy interface
Robustness
PropertyKenya.com has a robust error detecting and self-correcting logic embedded into its architecture. In the event of an unforeseen condition, the user is kindly notified, and details of the error, in addition to the state of the server are mailed to the Webmaster for immediate diagnosis and repair.What does this mean for users surfing the web? Users rarely get to see the cryptic messages abundant on the Internet; instead the get a message of what went wrong - in plain English and possible remedies or work-around. Research has shown that most error conditions on the server end are easily corrected by user intervention. Such robustness translates into user confidence on the site; users are able to get what they want.
Uniformity
PropertyKenya.com, implements one sleekly designed interface across all its pages. From the site-search engine to the property-search engine users get a uniform page design layout. This greatly reduces the learning curve for new visitors to the site. Users are able to quickly grasp and memorize the site layout after visiting two or three pages on PropertyKenya.com, thereby greatly reducing the amount of time spent to zero in on the information they are looking for.Conclusion
PropertyKenya.com seeks to provide a single point-and-click environment for ALL Kenyan realtors, while still maintaining the independence for those who prefer it that way.This article has examined just a few of the many excellent features on propertykenya.com, which is clearly a high-end Kenyan real estate website, examined from the perspectives of performance, scalability, usability and maintenance. Propertykenya.com clearly leads the way into the next generation of Kenya's online real estate.
webmaster@propertykenya.com
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