Who is Unique Mallorca?
Unique Mallorca is the island of Mallorca’s number one real estate agent. They’ve been operating for over fifteen years now and have built up a reputation for luxury and quality among their clients.
Their website contains some fantastic videos and imagery that showcase the quality of their properties. Not to mention they’re the first real estate agent in Mallorca to utilise virtual reality tour technology.
Unique Mallorca utilises best in class systems for their business which shows in the smoothness of their operation and service. Something we at Harpers can only approve of due to our geekiness!
What was the brief?
The client originally contracted Harpers in to restructure their SEO strategy. It quickly became apparent that the current site was not fit for purpose from an SEO point of view so the brief morphed into one of a redesign and then SEO push.
We were asked to modernise the Unique Mallorca website using the latest techniques while holding true to the original colour scheme and branding of the existing website.
As part of the engine design it was also important to seamlessly connect to third party providers for things such as customer service alerts and property data.
How did we do it?
We decided to rebuild the entire website from scratch using a new URL structure and properly organising the taxonomies (categories) of the properties. We also had to hook into several third party API’s to retrieve data on properties, images and other such material.
As part of the redesign we also needed to write a custom feed importer script to run automatically and assign content on a daily basis.
Last but not least we created several JavaScript animations throughout the site to give that wow factor when things such as virtual tours were opened or filter menus activated.
The end result
Home Page For Homes
The home page features a Javascript animation which reveals a virtual tour on click of an action button.
Also featured on this page are the latest properties and a search area so that clients can find what they want super quick.
Luxury Listing Pages
We built an advanced real time filter system so that clients could quickly search through the available properties. This is hidden off screen until the action button is clicked to activate it.
Rich media, such as HD videos, is used to highlight the quality of the properties on offer and give that extra wow factor.
Property Pages
The home page features a Javascript animation which reveals a virtual tour on click of an action button.
Also featured on this page are the latest properties and a search area so that clients can find what they want super quick.
The Tablet Listing Pages
Viewing on an iPad or other type of tablet needed to be silky smooth with a great user experience.
We developed slide in panel functionality for things such as filters as can be seen here to maximise screen space for the users.
The Mobile Home
Over 50% of website visitors now use mobile devices. We made Unique Mallorca a responsive design to give that smooth app like interface and user experience.
We stripped back and optimised the code for mobile devices and made sure that images were properly optimised for retina devices so that they looked crystal clear on iPhone and other HD devices.
Mobile Property Search
Of course the site needed to work just as well on a mobile as it does on a desktop. We used various techniques to slide in menus, filters and favourite sections using action icons.
We made sure that images were properly optimised for retina devices so that they looked crystal clear on iPhone and other HD devices.
The Nerdy Stuff
This was a challenging project due to the need to integrate several third party data sources and API’s. All this and the site needed to run like it had nitro in the tank. Here’s some of the technical stuff and how we did it.
Stats
Third party API Integration
We integrated the Freshsales Api for customer service and hooked WordPress up to it via Zapier. We also built a custom feed importer script which automatically downloaded, parsed and updated all the property data on an hourly basis.
Animations
As well as building a custom video player we wrote complex JavaScript animations using the Greensock Library. These animations center around things such as the home page virtual tour reveal, spinning M and other such eye candy.
DevOps
As the site was really slow on their existing shared VPS we set up Unique Mallorca on one of our dedicated VPS boxes and gave it ample resources to run fast. We also implemented caching for the site pages using Varnish to avoid the unnecessary database calls that the old site had been making (and slowing it down).
Scripts
Everything on the site is custom coded for efficiency. We created multiple scripts to deal with Ajax calls, favourites, login/logout, property statistics and of course search filtering.
Optimisation
As the site would be hosted on our network we were able to fully optimise the delivery of the website pages, images and content. We wrote custom Nginx/ngx_PageSpeed configuration rules to handle image optimisaton on the fly as well as minification and compression of assets. Last but not least we deployed the site on Cloudflare for fast global access and wrote some Cloudflare workers rules to handle caching of all content for non-logged in users.
