Convert Raw HTML/ CSS / JS to working pro site for new JoeHaydenRealtor.com

[Battler45]

Vihang & Vihar,

I know that both of you are working on several other tasks, but, as you have time, our next task will be to get underway on integrating the programming, etc. into the raw HTML / CSS / JS of the new JoeHaydenRealtor.com website.

Vihar, the reason I've included you on this ticket is that, as we've discussed, I believe we will need to create a set of duplicate content and blog posts for this new site, which we'll then be able to work with in development without affecting the current live site. Can either you or Vihang move forward with that when you have time? I suppose this will also involve duplicating the current Sites record to a new record, and then also duplicating the site's current AdminUser to a new user.

Vihang, I've also configured a new working website for the new site. You can find it here:

http://joehaydenrealtornew.sierrainteractivedev.com/index.html http://joehaydenrealtornew.sierrainteractivedev.com/inner.html

You can access this site via FTP using the usual credentials, with the username, joehaydenrealtornew_dev

Once you log in to the site, you'll see that common files such as default.asp, content.asp, etc. have already been added to the site. I'm not sure how those got there -- I may have added them in copying the site, or it's possible that Arthur added them after finishing the site HTML. If you examine them and find that they don't belong there, or that you prefer to proceed in a different way, it's fine to remove or change them as needed.

In configuring this site, we are going to need to make some changes to the Communities page, by adding an number of new top-level Communities sections, and then assigning the (duplicated) pages in the content manager to the appropriate sections using the attached spreadsheet.

As you'll see in the attached spreadsheet, the client would like to add 15 new top-level sections to the new site, and many of the pages currently in the main Communities section will be re-assigned to these newly created sections.

Once that's done, the main Communities page on the new site (which includes the alphabetized list) will need to pull neighborhoods from all of these sections (similar to what we are already doing with MLSKY.net).

Can you get started with the programming integration there when you have time? Please let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks.

Posted by Shah Vihang(unfuddle username: vihang)

[Battler45]

Vihang,

The rotating testimonials look good, thanks.

Regarding the section filenames, thanks for doing that. Can you also update the links in the sidebar on this page? http://joehaydenrealtornew.sierrainteractivedev.com/subdivisions-and-neighborhoods/ I believe I did not mention I had added that search by area box, and I think I also may have hard-coded the link values into that page. It would probably be better to reference constants for those from the shared constants_client_specific.asp file.

Thanks. Posted by Peskoe Ben(unfuddle username: bpeskoe)

[Battler45]

Please place further comments into Basecamp, here:

https://basecamp.com/1767592/projects/354099-110-joehaydenrealtor

[Battler45]

Vihang,

Also, as I am not feeling well tonight, I won't be able to provide feedback on any of the client sites additional steps -- so, for today, could you please coordinate with Vihar to see if there are any steps you can help with, either in the CAA or on the front end sites, to push the dev version of the search tools out to the live servers? Perhaps you could begin looking at integrating some of the new page components into the front end search tools? I know you will need some guidance there, but I think you should be able to get started on creating and integrating the programming for those components in the shared folders.

Thanks. Posted by Peskoe Ben(unfuddle username: bpeskoe)

[Battler45]

Vihar,

I am feeling mostly better and am back at work today. Thanks for your work integrating the updates into the front-end sites and into the live CAA. I did find one instance of the type of problem you described on AtHomeInLouisville.com and have corrected that on the Live and Dev versions of the site. One thing I realized is that some of the older pro sites are not referencing the common version of the programming from within listing-carousel-2.asp (AtHomeInLouisville.com was not). All sites eventually should be updated to use this common file (which is what we are doing now on the newer sites). Also, all sites should be updated to pull listings for the carousels via saved search rather than AgentOfficeID, in order to give the client control of these listings via the CAA. Since we have so much else to do at the moment, it's not a priority to go back and update all of these sites now, but we should remember to do that at some point.

With these updates in place, are we now ready to switch the new JoeHaydenRealtor.com development site back to pointing to the live database / CAA? If so, can you or Vihang please go ahead and make that change?

I am going through that site today making some updates and would like to send the client a link to begin previewing it tomorrow, but I would rather not do that until it has been switched to the live DB, because I am sure he will immediately want to begin making content changes via the admin area.

Also, to catch up on some of the previous comments in this thread:

RE: #29

I have verified that the Trulia and Zillow feeds are working correctly by setting up:

• http://www.louisvilleproperties.com/property-search/trulia/
• http://www.louisvilleproperties.com/property-search/zillow/

This site is on DEDN173 and these files are both working properly.

RE: #30

Regarding integrating the new page components into the search tools pages, my understanding was that, when you brought the dev branch back into the master branch on the CAA, you would need to publish the updates you completed a long time ago for the additional page components in the Edit Page form. This would force these components to become active in the CAA, and so I understood that we would therefore need to implement programming on the front end to make them active there as well. Is that not the case?

RE: #31

Regarding publishing the new GLAR updater, I agree that it would be best to do this as soon as possible. Your approach (a) sounds fine -- processing weekly files first, and then, once those are completed, processing the files from the past few days. Even if it ends up requiring us to process photos from past 5-6 days, that should be fine. Because, as you say, the value of the PhotoServer field is already set for the GLAR photos, front end sites should work without a problem during this transition, correct?

That said, our immediate need is to get the joehaydenrealtor.com development site pointing to the live database so that the client can review and begin making edits. As I understand it, we are now at the point where that is possible -- the only remaining item being the formation of the URLs in the new listing email notifications in the old GLAR updater.

If that's the case, once we switch to the new GLAR updater and you initiate the photo migration app, all new listing email alerts from that point will be generated by new GLAR updater, and so this issue will no longer be a problem, correct?

Regarding discliamer_text.asp, yes, you are correct that the most recent version was on DEDN173. I have updated DEDJ198 with the same, and also verified that Inetpub-DEV on DEDN173 is up-to-date.

Thanks.

Posted by Peskoe Ben(unfuddle username: bpeskoe)

[Battler45]

Ben,

Re #27:

I have pushed the blog changes to the live servers and checked this on 12 to 15 sites. There was an issue in the RSS feed icon display on the HomeToIndy.com site. I have fixed the same. Please check all sites and let me know if we need to tweak the RSS feed icon display on any site.

Re #28:

I am slightly confused regarding integrating new page components into the search tools pages. Do you mean integrating "New Contact Form" and "Property Statistics Box" components on the front-end site content page and all of these components on the blog detail page?

Thanks Posted by Shah Vihang(unfuddle username: vihang)

[Battler45]

Ben,

I hope you are doing well now. To inform you on the work-progress - I've updated programming on DEDN173 (Live site) to integrate custom-url changes. I've also modified a few files on the DEDJ198 server for the same. I'll update the rest of the files and update CAA (live) tomorrow.

A couple of points:

1 -- In order for the new Joe Hayden site to work correctly on the live database, we'll need to publish the new GLAR updater as soon as possible. The new updater will handle generation of unique-ids (spid). This will make sure that the new detail url-structure will function correctly.

Per our discussion in the last week, we had planned to initiation GLAR photo migration today (Friday). Unfortunately I couldn't start it as the ftp server (glarmls.com) contains daily photo files as well. Pls note that the photo-migration app was created to process weekly files only. A couple of workarounds are

a -- to download only weekly files from the FTP server and then process those photos. Once those photos are migrated, the new GLAR updater can be configured to process photos of last few days (starting from Monday).

b -- to publish the new GLAR updater without migrating photos. The front-end sites' programming uses the value of the PhotoServer field (MLSPhotos) to build photo-paths so we should be fine even if photos are present on both new and old servers.

Pls let me know your thoughts.

2 -- The disclaimer_text.asp file contents are different on DEDN173 and DEDJ198. Pls confirm if the file on DEDN173 contains the latest changes.

Thanks.

Posted by Shah Vihar(unfuddle username: vshah)

[Battler45]

Ben,

I have completed work on the jQuery Autocomplte plugin integration. Please note the following points regarding this:

1-- User can search Address (Street Name or Street #), Subdivision, City, Zip Code or MLS # from the location box.

2-- We get number of matching results for the "Street Name" and "Subdivision" so for now, I have set a limit to return top 10 matching results of each of these location types.

3-- The first matching result would be automatically selected. This is a workaround to force user to select from the matching results since we allow search on multiple location type and it is important for us to associate selected result with the appropriate location type.

4-- The Autocomplete would be activated, that is the matching results would be shown only after user has entered three or more characters.

Also, please note the following points:

1-- I forgot to mention this in earlier comments; I have used same styling for the content label widgets as in the old site and the images are pulled from http://joehaydenrealtor.sierrastatic.com/res/images/sicm/.

2-- The content on the home page is static and I haven't yet included the /shared/global/sicm/content/content_body.asp file in the default.asp file as the content on the home page is quite large and different compared to the content in the template.

3-- The HTML Document type used for the template pages is Strict whereas for the site it was set to use Transitional as a result there were few issues in the quick search box and sidebar display. So, I have updated the HTMLDocType to Strict on the Admin Settings form in CAA and also updated the main pages and blog pages for the same.

4-- We haven't yet updated the search tool links and image/file urls in the pages/posts contents. That is we have not yet replaced /property-search/ with /louisville-mls/ in links and images/files would be pulled from the /userfiles/182/ folder. I think it would be good to update image/file urls at the time of making site live, we can rename /userfiles/182/ to /userfiles/340/ otherwise we will need to copy images/files from old site (182) to new site (340). But please let me know if I should update the search tools links in the pages/posts contents.

Please check these changes and let me know your feedback.

Thanks

Posted by Shah Vihang(unfuddle username: vihang)

[Battler45]

Vihar,

Thanks for doing this. I am still not feeling well and have not been able to work much the past few days. I hope to be feeling better by Monday, and I will review this in more detail at that time.

Thanks. Posted by Peskoe Ben(unfuddle username: bpeskoe)

[Battler45]

Ben,

I will work on point-1 and 4 tomorrow.

Regarding 2:

When we migrated saved-searches/content-pages to the new site, we thought this would be a one-time operation and the client would add/update saved-searches/content pages to the new site. So we created script accordingly. We will need to make changes in the scripts to migrate added/updated saved-searches and content pages to the new site. Please let me know if it would be fine to do so when we make the site live.

Please find attached a spreadsheet listing all the neighborhood pages added on or after 28 November 2011.

Thanks Posted by Shah Vihang(unfuddle username: vihang)

[Battler45]

Ben,

I noticed that the "Interactive Map Search" and "Property Tracker" images are not linked. Please let me know if I should link these images to "/louisville-mls/map/" and "/louisville-mls/property-tracker/" pages respectively.

Also, now that we have removed the sidebar navigation, there is no way to view other pages in Buyers, Sellers, About and Contact sections. Please let me know if I should display the sidebar navigation for these sections.

Thanks Posted by Shah Vihang(unfuddle username: vihang)

[Battler45]

Vihang,

RE: #57

Sorry, I thought that I had already responded to this comment. I do think it would be good to stick to the old site and add new sections into the old site, and your suggested approach seems good. Let's plan on taking this approach when we get closer to launching the site.

Also:

1 - In the quick search on the site home page, the updated auto-complete functionality seems to be working very well, but I'm getting a javascript confirmation message when I submit the form. Can you remove this?

2 - On the interior page quick search, please remove the Area, MLS # and Street Address tabs, leaving only the main tab. Then, change the "Location" label to, "Location, Address or MLS#" and implement the same functionality on this box as on the corresponding box in the home page quick search.

3 - On the home page, please remove the current "facebook / twitter" box and replace it with a "from the blog" box. As content for this box, please include links to the 5 or 10 most recent blog posts. This will be slightly different than what we typically do on these sites in that it will only be the blog post title included, but not the date posted, or any of the post content or who it was posted by, etc. It will basically look like the attached. However, instead of the triangle icon, please just use the same square "dot" image that is being used in the li element of unordered lists (bullet points).

Because the height of this content will always vary with the length of the post titles, I think we will need to include a scroll bar at the right edge of this box so that the user can scroll down to view overflow.

4 - On the interior pages, please replace the Twitter / Facebook widget in the same way. In that case, though, include links to the 8 most recent posts and allow the height of the widget to vary so that a scroll bar is not necessary on the interior pages.

(Also, on the interior pages, the text of the Free Market Analysis header is a different font size than the other widget titles for some reason.)

5 - Also, on the neighborhood pages, the client would prefer that, for the sidebar navigation, we take an approach more similar to what we have done on the recent stealth sites, where we include the Fetured Searches rather than links to all pages in that section.

So, can you please update the sidebar for all of the neighborhood pages / sections with featured searches links for each section?

These would include:

• Newest Listings
• Price Reductions
• Foreclosures
• Short Sales
• Subdivisions

The client has already created "Newest Listings" and "Subdivisions" pages for all sections (I believe). Can you work on creating the saved searches and associated pages for the remaining items? (The client has already created a "Foreclosures" page in the Highlands section for use as a template for this and other pages, just replacing "Foreclosures" with "Short Sales" and "Price Reductions" as needed.)

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks. Posted by Peskoe Ben(unfuddle username: bpeskoe)

[Battler45]

Vihang,

If you're feeling up to it, yes, please do link those images to their respective pages. Also, please do include the sidebar navigation for these (non-geographic area) sections). In the geographic areas sections, please include the "search by area" box below the featured searches box. (This is the same box that is already included on the main neighborhoods page.)

Thanks. Posted by Peskoe Ben(unfuddle username: bpeskoe)

[Battler45]

Vihang,

RE: #32

The auto-complete plugin seems to be working great, thank you. Can you please:

1 - Update the default text of the search box to, "City or Neighborhood or Zip or Address or MLS #"

2 - Update the order of the results returned to be in that order as well. So, city results would be the first returned, then neighborhood, then zip, etc. That way, a neighborhood result would be selected by default rather than an address result, which I think will be the more common use case. Also, a question: if the client wishes to add Area to the list of options (in place of City or in addition to the options already there), would that be a problem?

3 - In the formatting of the options in the results list, can you format them more closely to how they are presented in the chosen drop-down, matching the colors, line-spacing and indentation used there? I believe the Chosen results list formatting is a bit easier to read.

It really seems to be quick at returning results, and the user interface is very intuitive -- nice job!

Regarding the additional points:

1 - That's fine. I am going to be making some further updates in this regard tomorrow.

2 - Yes, I agree it's best to leave that for now. I will ask the client to let us know his wishes there.

3 - Yes, I apologize that I forgot to mention this, but it's fine (and necessary) to use the Strict Doctype. I should have realized this would cause problems for you.

4 - Yes, I agree about waiting to update the links to site assets / photos until we are ready to make the site live, because then we will be able to do it all at once rather than in multiple steps. But, please do go ahead and update the "/property-search/" links to use the new "/louisville-mls/" URL structure.

Thanks. Posted by Peskoe Ben(unfuddle username: bpeskoe)

[Battler45]

Ben,

RE #39:

I have updated the default text and the results order accordingly. Yes, It would be possible to add Area or County to the searchable options.

I have also update the formatting of the autocomplete drop-down to match the formatting of the Chosen plugin.

Please note that there was some issue in the autocomplete drop-down display on the search-tools pages in IE 9, most probably due to use of Prototype library on these pages. I looked for possible solutions but could not find any. However, using newer version of jQuery (later than 1.4.2) seems to have fixed this issue so, I have included /property-search/res/includes/jquery/jquery-1.5.1.min.js/ in the /sist/joehayden/clinet_js.asp.

I have also updated /property-search/ with /louisville-mls/ in page contents.

Thanks Posted by Shah Vihang(unfuddle username: vihang)

[Battler45]

Vihang,

Thanks for doing this. I've notified the client about the missing default pages -- I assume he is in the process of adding them, but wanted to double-check. Also, I believe what you have done with the Section Filenames / Section Names so far is correct -- I will let you know if the client has any requests to the contrary.

Thanks. Posted by Peskoe Ben(unfuddle username: bpeskoe)

[Battler45]

Ben,

I have updated the links in the search by area box. Please note that when I click any of these links, I am redirected to 404 page as we have not yet added default pages for these sections. Please let me know if I should add the same or make an existing page the default page of each of these sections.

Thanks Posted by Shah Vihang(unfuddle username: vihang)

[Battler45]

Ben,

RE #44:

I have updated the autocomplete implementation per point-1 and included all new section pages on the site-map page per point-4. Please check the same.

RE #46:

Yes, it would be difficult to merge the newly added/ updated content into the new site but we will try to find a solution for this. Thinking more about this, I believe it would be good to add new sections in the old site (182) and assign pages to the appropriate section per the spreadsheet when new site goes live. We can then discard the new site (340). This will require us to update the constants in the new front-end site but this would be easier compared to migrating newly added/updated content to the new site. This will also save us from re-assigning leads, admin-user and blog records and assets (images/files) to the new site. All we need to do would be to:

1-- Add new sections in the old site (182)

2-- Assign pages to appropriate sections per the spreadsheet

3-- Replace the "/property-search/" to "/louisville-mls/" in the post/pages contents.

Please let me know your thoughts on this.

Thanks Posted by Shah Vihang(unfuddle username: vihang)

[Battler45]

Vihang,

Also, can you please make a quick change to the new property listing detail page (both the current version and the updated version that you are working on)? Joe Hayden emailed to say he felt that the photos on the new detail page look a bit blurry -- not in the "view large photos" / overlay view, but in the default photo viewer that is part of the page itself.

I see this being true, and believe it's because we are displaying the "middle" size of photos, which are actually smaller than the size at which we are displaying them, and so need to be enlarged for display on this page.

So, on the new property detail pages, can you update this photo area to pull the large version of the photos rather than the middle version?

Thanks. Posted by Peskoe Ben(unfuddle username: bpeskoe)

[Battler45]

Vihang,

When you have time, we have a few more updates needed for the new JoeHaydenRealtor.com site:

1 - On the home page, please integrate the main content block with the content manager and change the content to: (H1) Louisville Real Estate with the Joe Hayden Real Estate Team (/H1) "Welcome to the premier website for Louisville Real Estate! It is our pleasure to share with you the journey of homeownership. You can perform a comprehensive Louisville MLS search, you can view all Homes for Sale in Louisville, including Jefferson, Oldham, Bullitt, and Shelby Counties. You can learn about Buying a Home and research Selling your Home. We are a highly-experienced team of agents ready to serve all of your real estate needs."

2 - Please add the following testimonials to the rotation on the home page: "The best part about working with Joe was that he was always more focused on answering our questions, giving us good advice, and finding homes that met our needs than he was on closing a deal. We would recommend him to anyone." John and Natalie Harris

"My wife and I have spent the past 12 years working in the Louisville area real estate market during which time we've met so many real estate agents. Joe is one of the very best and has the heart of a teacher. Joe's team is who we chose to sell our own home, and we would highly recommend them to anyone buying or selling a home in the Louisville area." Mike Roberts

"Joe Hayden is a very professional real estate agent who listened to our specific wants and needs. Since we from out of town his knowledge about East Louisville and Oldham County was most helpful. I needed handicap accessibility which is hard to find, and Joe did not waste our time looking at property that had no potential to meet my requirements. We highly recommend for all your real estate needs." Wayne and Becky Hartigan

3 - The client has finished creating the rest of the default pages for the community sections. Please update the Page Filenames for these pages from "/homes-for-sale/" to "/"

4 - For each of the community sections, the client would like to create "Featured Searches" as we have done for a few other sites (MLSHomesKY.com, MLSKY.net, etc.) The client would like the following searches for each section:

• Newest Listings (already created, and so are corresponding pages)
• Subdivisions (no search needed, and corresponding pages are already created)
• Price Reductions
• Short Sales
• Foreclosures

Can you create Price Reductions, Short Sales and Foreclosures searches for each community section based on the criteria the client has used for creating the active listings widget on the default page for each section?

The client is then going to provide us with default text for the corresponding pages for each of the above, and we will use that to create community pages once he has given that to us.

5 - On the property listing detail pages in Internet Explorer, the four buttons across the top of the page are not all displaying in one line, but are wrapping to a second line. I'm sure this is a CSS issue with something defined on a global basis in the stylesheet. Can you see if you can figure this out? If you're not able to, let me know and I will ask Evgen to take a look.

6 - On the property listing detail pages in Firefox, the tabs are not displaying correctly (Overview, Maps & Street View, etc.) Again, I'm sure this has to do with a definition in the stylesheet -- please see if you can figure this out, but don't spend too much time on it. We will ask Evgen to look at it otherwise.

7 - On the property listing detail page (both the old and new version) can you change the title text of the Neighborhood links to exactly match the text that is being linked? So, for example, if the neighborhood link said, "See all homes for sale in Academy Ridge" the title text on the link would say that same thing instead of "See all Academy Ridge Listings"

8 - The client asked about the photos / images in the content pages. I can't remember now whether we are going to stick with the new site ID (340) or revert to the ID of the current site (182) when we make this site live. If we are going to move to a new site ID, can you add a 301 redirect in the .htaccess file of the CAA that would redirect any requests for content-manager images / photos on the old site to the corresponding location on the new site?

So, for example, a request to the following URL:

http://client.sierrainteractivedev.com/UserFiles/182/image/Louisville_Real_Estate_and_Homes.jpg

Would be 301'd to this URL instead:

http://client.sierrainteractivedev.com/UserFiles/340/image/Louisville_Real_Estate_and_Homes.jpg

I think that's it for now. These changes would be highest priority at the moment, as the client is very anxious to get this site up and running, and he is one of our most important clients.

Thanks. Posted by Peskoe Ben(unfuddle username: bpeskoe)