By Lawrance Morrissey
As the old saying goes: Better late than never. For Sale By Owner Magazine is proud to finally be able to announce the debut of its new website: ByOwnerPros.com. Originally announced in November of 2006, the website was completely overhauled. The new website was written from the ground up with an entirely different look and feel. It has numerous new features including a built-in Google Map on every listing, advanced searching capabilities by city, price, address, ID# or even by school district! Buyers can even look at a list of their 'Recently Viewed' homes. Due to popular demand we also have a section of the site for rental property. Home sellers now have complete access to their listings to make changes as they see fit. Of course, we still have many popular features carried over from our original site including a button to print a flyer of the property, a mortgage calculator and a quick search which shows all properties to be listed by city.
Originally, our plan was to change the domain name and give our site (www.fsbo-indy.com) a much needed visual facelift. | After nearly five months of work, we decided to change the backbone technology that runs the site, therefore, scrapping all the original and revised code. For you tech savvy people reading this, we were running a Microsoft Access web-driven database using .asp and VBScript languages. We decided to upgraded to an industrial strength MYSQL database using .php technology.
The major decisions for switching technology came down to planning for future growth. Not only is .asp/Access a very limited technology, it's slower, less stable and also more expensive to maintain. Lastly, it has fewer add-on modules available for future expansion, such as blogs, forums, calendars, etc. Finding professional programmers who specialize in .php is also easier.
So while the new website is officially open, it's not officially done. In my opinion, good sites never are, they are always a work in progress. Over the next couple of months, we will making subtle upgrades and updates to insure useability is world-class. So while we might have been a little late for the party, we wanted to be sure we were the best dressed.
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