Understand the business then deliver the solution
House Revolution is an online estate agency business. The website and systems were delivered before bricks and mortar. Their vision – to empower and enable customers to sell their own houses from valuation, take-on, descriptions right through to offer and completion – was revolutionary in a market that’s rammed with greedy, and sometimes, not so honest estate agents – they deserved to do well and we were going to make sure they got what they wanted!
Greenfield site
House Revolution had no website and no front-of-house systems when they approached us. They needed someone to spend time with them, understand them, and then “transpose” the undertanding of their business and objectives into IT solutions. So, we worked solidly with House Revolution for over 9 months, carrying out business analysis, systems analysis, lots and lots of diagramming and wireframes, workflow planning, process understanding and lots of scribblings on paper, to deliver their first website and integrated back-office systems to manage their entire estate agency business. They now have a call centre, based in Norwich, which is powered entirely by systems we’ve written for them.Business solutions
What did they need?- House Revolution needed a website that worked fast.
- They needed document storage on a per-customer basis that was quick to retrieve, indexed and searchable.
- They needed the easy ability to talk with the customers while they were online.
- They needed to be able to talk to each other via secure chat when they were working in different locations.
- They needed a company who would partner with them on a long-term basis, rather than deliver then walk away.
The tech
We provided them with the hosting of their website, their back-office systems and email services and also email, calendar, address book and more on their mobile devices … and we’re delighted to say that they are delivering what they set out to do – to empower and enable customers to sell their own houses, at an affordable and attractive price. There’s some nice techy features that look simple but work well:- images uploaded to their website by the vendor are resized automatically to suit various scenario
- the website holds a lot of confidential data – tens of thousands of customers and hundreds of property details – the website, as with most of our sites, has been PEN tested and passed with flying colours
- we upload all properties for them every evening to all major property portals with detailed rollback and log tracking
- we use a lot of AJAX on the website to reduce page load, increase visitor interactivity and improve usability … but balance that with search-engine-optimised pages (so keep pages separate where it makes more sense to do so!)
- the systems written for them are infinitely scalable – add another 100 call centre staff in 10 different locations – no problem. Increase web traffic to 1000 new properties per hour – no problem.
- We developed a separate House Revolution Blog for them, hosted on one of our servers using WordPress
- We use Live Chat on the website to improve client interaction – proving a huge success right from launch.
- Real time website statistics and visitor tracking
- Google analytics with goal and money tracking
Richard Savelli
managing director
House Revolution
Mark has a great understanding of the business aspects of building IT systems, which means he can often deliver things you need, but didn’t even ask for! It is very refreshing to deal with an IT person who you can interpret your business requirements into working and flexible systems. A recent example – the objective of our recent website redesign, was to just to change the colour scheme to reflect our new branding. However, Mark delivered so much more, updating the whole style of the website, that was starting to look a bit dated, even at 5 years old!