Sutton.com 2.0 Launch!

Today we launched the new sutton.com. This is a milestone day for me because I’ve been working on this project for more than 2.5 years. It is an amazing feeling when something you’ve put so much hard work into is finally released. Instead of blathering on about my feelings, let me tell you how we built sutton.com and why this is the best real estate site in Canada:

1. Be search engine friendly. We’ve designed the site so search engines can easily index and catalog all data on site. You can browse to everything, listings, agents and offices.
2. Don’t hide your listings. You can access our listings fast. I chose to design our listings around a browse and filter approach rather than search and find. A single click gives you more than a thousand listings in Toronto from our front page. Sweet!
3. Use clean urls. Almost everything on Sutton.com can be accessed from a short URL.
   1. http://www.sutton.com/listings/view/V631030 - a listing
   2. http://www.sutton.com/office/search - the office search
   3. http://www.sutton.com/office/BC/Vancouver - our Vancouver offices
   4. http://www.sutton.com/realtor/ewong - a REALTOR®’s flexisite
4. Use clean mark up. We’ve built the site using as few table layouts as possible. This makes the site much more accessible as well as reduces the amount of HTML required. The site is very usable in Links.
5. Make the site fast. People hate waiting for stuff to load. The new site is twice as much code as the previous one and it still loads just as quick. We’ve invested lots of money on a dedicated database server and a dedicated web server. Performance is important and we’re always looking at ways to make the site faster!
6. Make the site usable. Everything is easier to use. Our goal for the 2.0 release was to duplicate the functionality of the site. During development we’ve made improvements to usability across the board.
7. Never forget the small stuff. We’ve done many things to make our listings really stand out. Loading photos and the mortgage calculator in Thickbox windows (check it out). Descriptive titles for search engine display: 8 Bedroom 8 Bathroom House for Sale in Vancouver, BC. Icons for listing features, and tonnes more.

This is the technology we used:

1. Leverage Open Source. We built the site on top of Drupal. Powered by Linux, Apache, PHP and MySQL. We also leveraged Thickbox, NetPBM, TinyMCE, Subversion and Smarty. There are probably a few others I missed. :)
2. Buy the fastest servers you can afford. Our web server is a Dual core Xeon with 4GB of RAM. We have a dedicated database server which is a dual processor Xeon with 4GB of RAM and a RAID10 array (FAST!).
3. Use the latest web techniques. Use CSS layouts, use clean URLs, be good to Google and make sure your site is really easy to use.
4. Get the brightest people you can afford. This site would not have been possible if it wasn’t for Dave Shea helping us with the design. The good advice from the guys at Bryght. The site’s main programmers Shaun and Will and Sutton’s Marketing team! Go Team Sutton!

It has been a long haul to get to this point and we’re just getting started. Around the corner is Sutton 2.1 and 2.2 with more features and surprises for you and the Real Estate industry.

[tags]sutton.com, real estate, open source[/tags]