About the Castleman Estate Agents

Castleman Estate Agents is a Dorset-based company specializing in assisting buyers, sellers and landlords with all of their real estate needs. They offer competitive mortgage and valuation services, as well as a wide range of property styling options to help you get the best possible price for your home.

The business was inspired by the Castleman trailway, a scenic and relaxing walking, cycling, and horse riding path in Dorset. The 16.5 mile (26.5 kilometer) route follows much of the old Southampton to Dorchester railway line while also connecting many small towns between Ringwood and Poole. This is an area they know well and have spent time exploring with their children- something they want others to be able to enjoy too.

The Requirement

As an independent estate agent just starting out, the business owner approached us to build him an Estate Agent website with a difference. He had a vision which was clear and needed us to design something that was going to fit the bill.

There was also a requirement for property feed capabilities via his internal cloud based system so that he only had to add/update properties in one place rather than having to update in his software then update again on the website.

Finally the site should have a community feel to it rather than just a website for the buying and selling of property services.

Work carried out

As the customer needed the ability to update the site themselves along with blog and community sections, we built the site on WordPress which allowed us to complete the web design part of the project to exact customer requirements.

Once the initial build had been carried out we created a community section along with a fully functioning blog. All of the content was provided by the client which was then entered onto the site onto the relevant pages.

The property feed function was then tackled, this was achieved by using the WP Property Feed plugin. Following successful testing of the plugin in its raw format we set out to design the look and feel of the property display pages. This included the property listings along with the property view itself. All fields were mapped to show on the front end and in line with the property feed using the Vebra feed. The customer is using Alto as the property management solution which the Vebra API fully supports.

Once the testing had been fully carried out for the data feed and the rest of the site was put through our final site audit which included mobile responsiveness, we went live with the website.

The result

We believe that we got the design remit right with our client and this was confirmed by the business owner who said that it exactly matched his vision. Together with the look and feel his request to have the site developed with a community feel to it was completely covered.

The property feed works a treat and all of the client’s properties are updated on the front end automatically without any intervention from us or the client.

We continue to provide support with updates to the site as and when requested, mainly within the community section of the website. The site has maintained its look and feel from go live through to today and we couldn’t be more proud of the fact that we managed to design something that not only matched the clients vision but we managed to go above and beyond the initial remit on time and on budget.