Davis Brown - Estate Agents
How it all started ..
In 2000 the Davis Brown Group used YELL.com to build, host and market their website. The problem at the time was that it would take up to two weeks for YELL to place new properties onto their site which obviously wasn’t good enough for such a dynamic market.
YARG were approached to see if we could do something to help. The brief was to produce a new website using YELL’s look and feel but with a system in place that would allow them to immediately post new properties. At the time we had a product in development called YeTE ( YARG e-commerce Trading Engine ). The framework was configured to provide Davis Brown with an adminstartion portal, allowing them to quickly post and administer new properties. We then styled the framework’s presentation layer to YELL’s design. A year later they got bored of YELL’s design and so it was replaced with a new look and feel in less than a day, due to the skinning features of our YeTE framework.
Over the years a lot of our YeTE framework functionality was replaced by Microsoft’s .NET and the decision in 2004 was to drop it from our development program. YeTE is still used and supported as the core framework for some of our client sites today.
In 2006 Davis Brown decided to expand their business to not only cover Davis-Brown.co.uk but also specialist sites for both Property Sales and Lettings. The brief was to design three new sites, Davis-Brown being the core site and the other two being specialist views on the core site.
Whenever we take existing client work on board we always recommend that it’s worth getting quotes from other vendors to give a rough idea on what the “market price” is. Davis Brown were given quotes for the development of three sites. Our solution was to save development time, cost, support and maintenance by providing onesite but with three different look and feels, or “skins”.
Previously we would have used our framework to produce the “skinning” solution but this feature has now been introduced into Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2005 framework as “Themes”.
The end result allows one “back-end” database and Davis Brown’s staff update one site not three!
Have a look for yourself!
www.davis-brown.co.uk
www.westend2let.co.uk
www.westend4sale.co.uk
If you think we can help then please get in
contact.
Technologies Used
The site was built using C#, ASP.NET 2.0 using SQL server as the backend database.
One site, three styles ..
