It all happened in march, this year, when I left my job at Frequestis and before starting a new job at BoatYard X, I had a month free. I thought it would be fun to take a short break before a new job. Made some great plans, visiting my parents, going to Italy for a week, just recharging my batteries. Long story short, Covid hit Romania and we thought it would be better if we canceled our trip to Italy (which it was!). So I found myself at home alone for a whole month. At that time I was contacted by someone who needed a new website for their real estate agency…
I picked the project up and after a months hard work, LINK Imobiliare was born. It basically is a website for a new real estate agency in Cluj-Napoca, selling apartments in Cluj and Floresti.
I could have created it from scratch, but the idea was to keep expenses low, so a Java backend would have been an overkill. It is based on a commercial PHP script that was highly customised to suit my clients needs. It was a long time ago since I wrote PHP, that is why I opted for buying a script and customising it.
The home page is very simple, I have tried to keep the new design as clean as possible, displaying only the necessary information. It has a section containing the latest entries and pagination, and a few fields that allows the visitor to filter them.
A separate search page allows inputing more details when it comes to searching entries. It also features a map containing the locations of the properties, so would be easier to pick if you have a specific area in mind.
The property details page serves with a lot more information with an image gallery, it features a map with the property’s location and details about the agent selling it. It also displays a form which lets the visitor send a quick note telling that he is interested in the real estate and wants to be contacted by someone from the agency.
Besides the responsive design, a lot of time went with speeding up the existing script. The page load time was not that good, so that needed a lot of optimisation.
All in all it is a fun little project, it’s been a while since I worked on something low-budget, needing to pick the technologies with maintenance cost in mind. I enjoyed the liberty that the client gave me and I could create something in my minimal style, keeping things simple. I’m quite pleased with the results and I’m happy to have it in my portfolio.