Their website was in need of an overhaul, and we were very glad to be commissioned to give it a makeover and improve their online property catalogue. We think the design is one of our best so far.

This is a business with many strings to its bow – from business appraisals to expert witness reports, EPCs and property valuations – and the site had to reflect that. As well as showing off their many and varied professional services they wanted to be able to show off the range of properties for which they are agents. Many of these are beautiful historic residential properties in the centre of York, owned by York Conservation Trust.

Their old website had been operating faithfully for years, and we were able to work with the previous developers to export and transfer their existing catalogue into the updated system that we had built. This saved them an enormous amount of time.

We also developed a system which creates informal user accounts – in order to view full PDF property particulars people have to enter some brief contact details. This only happens once per visitor, so it isn’t too obtrusive, and no subsequent logging in is required. We hasten to add, of course, that no contact details are passed to any third party, it simply allows the company to be able to report on the level of interest shown in the properties and businesses being offered for sale to their clients.

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Whatever the problem is, and whether it’s with hardware, software or a website, there are a few things you can do to help the techies of this world help you.

The golden rule, of course, is: don’t panic! And before you turn-it-off-and-on-again -

1. Grab that error message!
When something goes wrong, make a note of what it says. That error report may not mean anything to you but it will to someone. If it’s on a web page, chances are you’ll be able to copy-and-paste it into an email. A half-remembered error report can confuse the issue no end.

2. What’s going on?
A clear, step-by-step description of what you were doing when you got the error helps enormously. If you got the error on a webpage, let us know exactly which one it was – copy the contents of the address bar into an email. If you were uploading a file, send us the file. If it was something on your computer, remember all the programs you had open at the time, and tell us the last thing you did before the error showed up.

3. Your machine
It’s vital to know what you’re using – which browser, which operating system. Is it Windows, Linux, or Mac? Are you using Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari or Opera? The first thing a techie will try to do is replicate the error. Chances are it’s not something that happened when they tested it, so what’s the difference between your machine and theirs?

Here’s a great resource to get all this info quickly: www.supportdetails.com from Imulus, who earn serious brownie points for this site. It gives you all the details about your own system and lets you download them as a CSV or PDF, or just send it all in an email straight to your local techies.

4. Even better: show us!
The best you can do: as soon as anything goes wrong, grab that screen! On a Windows machine, pressing Print Screen (often labelled “PrtScn”) actually does just that – it grabs the current screen and puts it in the Windows clipboard. You can then paste it into an image file and save it using MS Paint (under ‘Accessories ‘) or – your favourite and mine – IrfanView, the free image viewer. In Mac OS X, I’m reliably informed, Command-Shift-3 will take a screenshot and save it as a file on your desktop.

Send this screenshot to your helpful techie friends and it’ll help them no end.

This has the added benefit of showing us what you’ve got open and what operating system you’re using. It’ll tell us – roughly – what version of what browser you’re using, and which operating system. They tell a thousand words, you know!

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We’ve been working for some time with Get Cycling – nationally renowned cycling promoters and purveyors of all manner of pedal-powered fun. We also took on the task of developing a site for their sister company, Company of Cyclists.

The site was launched last week: Cyclorama – a guide to all things pedal-powered. It’s an ambitious project, an online bicycle (/tricycle/quadricycle…) exhibition featuring high-quality specialist cycle manufacturers and retailers worldwide, backed up with the results of a lifetime of work in bicycle journalism. If you like bikes – and I do – you’ll probably love it.

The site is being launched in stages – right now you can read over 250 articles, essays and technical guides in the bike culture section. Over the next few months we’ll see the exhibits appear: the retailers, manufacturers and bikes on exhibition, as well as blogs, discussion boards and an online shop.

The site has been coded to be entirely multilingual, so that exhibitors can upload their profiles in their own languages, and in as many of them as they like. Translations are being added to the existing site.

That’s one of the complications of the site: the other big one has been not getting absorbed in reading all the articles!

The Cyclorama Homepage

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National property portals such as Rightmove, PropertyLive and Fish4 are well advertised and receive a huge amount of web traffic. City Lets had been advertising their catalogue on some of these portals by manually maintaining the details of each property. A time-consuming task, given that the data essentially replicates the content of their website.

So the solution is obvious: have our website database automatically keep the national property portals up-to-date on the latest changes.

Setting up the feeds wasn’t as straightforward as you might hope: of course, the various portals have a range of wonderfully incompatible specifications for data transfer, but that’s the kind of problems we get paid to sort out.

So, our brand spanking new server (which Andy will be telling you all about soon enough) gathers all the data together every night and uploads it all to Rightmove, PropertyLive, Zoopla! and (coming soon:) Fish4.

This means much broader publicity for all City Lets properties, and City Lets save a heck of a lot of time by not having to maintain their catalogue manually.

In other City Lets news, they are also currently promoting their York serviced apartments service, so this has meant some new SEO adjustments to give the relevant pages on the site a boost for search phrases related to this.

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The grandiose term for these are Geographical Information Systems – GIS. And they are incredibly useful. You can find out whether your house will be underwater come the next flash flood, you can find your political representatives, or you can find your nearest bakery.

So – if you’ve got an interest in the real world, you’ll need to get your flag raised on the virtual one too. You’ll want to be listed on Google Local Business - currently rivalling the Yellow Pages as the source for information on local services. Like anything with user-created content, it can be messy. Some unscrupulous types will go to any length to hog the top spots (can you spot the spam listings here?). But list yourself, and they will come.

But there’s so much more you can do with maps, courtesy of Google -

Get a map on your website
It’s really straightforward to embed a Google map on your website showing your location. We offer that as standard to all our clients – check out this site selling ethical jewellery for an example. It lets people zoom and pan around to get the context they need, depending on how well they know your area. You don’t get that with a static image.

People love playing with maps. Men especially. If you’ve got some excuse for getting a map on your site, you should. For some businesses, like these letting agents in York, it’s obvious why you’d want one. But any excuse is a good one. We’ve recently finished setting up a site for a Yorkshire wine merchant, and we’re going to be adding to this over the new few months. One thing you’ll see on the site soon is a map showing where the vinyards are that grew the wine they sell. Select ‘Satellite Map’ and see the actual rows of vines. Doesn’t that make the wine seem more special? I know I’ll be checking to see if they’ve got any wines from the vinyards I cycled through on holiday.

I’ll blog later on some of the problems we encounter when we’re using these systems and some of the ways we get around these them.

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