Your New classified Ads!

Katia Janin on Friday, November 28th 2008

Flickr by 1suisse
Flickr by 1suisse
Classified ads improve! In this note, 3 important points to underline: new functions, new ergonomy, new categories ;)

Webservice package added

The complete review of the classified ads was the good occasion to include, as we usually do, what we call the webservice package.

Is in question the add of:
- the URL Rewritting on the categories and classifieds themselves to improve their referencing
- the position determination technology of the add on a Google Map
- the display of the last classifieds posted on the webservice homepage
- the link for the submission of classifieds in the SNS. The ad posted is also visible in the activity flow of your social network member.

Improved ergonomy

The classified submission process has been completely overhauled. Before, post a classified required a lot of clicks. We wanted to improve that.

To do so, it has been necessary to consider a huge constraint: the access restriction case. Indeed, the classifieds provide wide possibilities of customization. For each category, you can make public/private sending or consulting a classified... it results a lot of different cases to consider! The restriction control is a big issue in the process.

In the end, we proceeded as we did with the schedule. The first step is the choice of a category. Then everything follows: access to the soumission form if it's allowed, or previously, the send of the user to the authentification/inscription page.

By the way, we took the opportunity to improve the typing control in the submission form, and also the warning messages displayed in error cases. To do so, we leant on the huge comparable work done when elaborating the creablocreablog option. g option.

For the classifieds display, we focused on pointing out the thumbnails. The list-style display mode underline them well. However, if most of your classifieds have few or no illustration, it's possible not to display them. In this case an icon will inform the user about the presence of an image for the concerned ads.

Little detail, a New sticker identifies in the list the classifieds of the day ;)
Your New classified Ads!

5 categories to rank your classifieds

I end up with the major improvements we brought. 5 big families are available to give a type to your portal ads:
  • Real Estate
  • Job
  • Meeting
  • Vehicules
  • Products
Those families are the most generic possible. Each one permit add descrition parameters to your classifieds (the ones specified)

In the "Products" type, your ads have no particular specificity. That's the family you'll use when you won't find what you want in the others.

For the 4 other families, there are options that enable you detail your ads. For an exemple, in the "vehicules" category, you can specify: the price, label, color, milage, year ( when it has been released ) and type (car, moto, etc...)

The title of specificities can be edited so that you can customize each family.

I'll end up with this very useful functionnality: automatic-fill-out in the specificity forms. An exemple: the user is writting the specificity "brand" for a vehicule ad. During the typing, he can choose between the brand names already filled in by other users. This permit homogenize all information in your classifieds, avoiding useless doublets (typing errors, case diferences, abbreviations...)   

We chose to rank the classifieds in big families for 2 reasons:
1 -the ulterior add of filters, to enable your users extracting relevant information
2 -the copying of your classifieds in Google Base in order to improve their visibility and referencing.

Thus the work is not finished yet. Sebastien P. and Jérôme P. still have got a lot on their plate.
Whatever, congratulations gentlemen for the big part already achieved!




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