Squiz

Case Study - homesite.com.au

About homesite.com.au

homesite.com.au started life in 2004 as a joint venture between News Limited and the Housing Industry Association Ltd (HIA). In March 2007 homesite.com.au was purchased by the REA Group.

homesite.com.au is currently rated as Australia's No.1 home and garden site (as measured by Nielsen/NetRatings) and since 2004 has inspired and helped more people to improve their home than any other website in Australia. homesite.com.au offers access to comprehensive resources that can’t be found elsewhere including the latest renovation products, great brands, expert advice, tips and DIY videos.

Challenge - low flexibility & high host

When Squiz became involved with homesite.com.au in October 2005 the existing website was suffering from a lack of flexibility and functionality in the propriety CMS they had been using. Compounding that problem were the high costs associated with regular bespoke development needed to add the missing functionality.

Given that the website was heavy on search - Squiz undertook a thorough analysis of the search trends to develop an information architecture tailored to meet homesite.com.au business requirements. Aside from improved search performance there also had to be flexible new ways to conduct searches (E.g. category) to ensure more meaningful results.

Another challenge was the migration of all existing website content into MySource Matrix and to apply the new designs. Naturally it needed to be a lightning fast implementation with minimum disruption.

Solution - fast, functional & affordable

Squiz were proactive in putting forward a range of exciting new options for homesite.com.au to consider. In October 2005 Squiz was commissioned to re-energise homesite.com.au using MySource Matrix.

homesite.com.au chose the Squiz / MySource Matrix solution because it could deliver the needed back end flexibility and front end functionality that users were expecting.

The Squiz solution utilised standard commodity hardware which would save homesite.com.au a considerable amount of money. Squiz developed migration scripts to automatically import the pre-existing homesite.com.au content directly into MySource Matrix via Matrix’s flexible Application Programming Interface (API), again saving valuable time and money.

Squiz additionally developed several custom features to support homesite.com.au business logic including products, content indexes and suppliers. Other developments include a custom monitoring system which produces monthly reports in CSV format, and a pre-processed caching facility that can be updated out-of-hours whilst still requesting dynamic data from the CMS.

Squiz provided a range of professional services for the project including:

• Dedicated full time Account/Project Management
• High level scoping of requirements
• Information architecture tailored to homesite.com.au business requirements
• Creative development of design templates and coding them to the MySource Matrix system
• MySource Matrix CMS installation including modules and custom development
• Provision of hosting and hardware infrastructure
• Content Editor and System Administrator training at the Leichhardt facility
• Development of scripts for the automatic migration of existing content
• 24 x 7 Service Level Agreement

Additionally, Squiz delivered a solution to integrate the True Local database (of tradespersons) into homesite.com.au. Put simply, a search conducted on homesite.com.au for a local tradesperson (e.g. carpenter), actually searches the True Local website database for an answer. The search results are then displayed on a homesite.com.au page and as far as the homesite.com.au user is concerned, they never left homesite.com.au.

Result - "load em up" homesite.com.au

The re-energised homesite.com.au (capable of withstanding 1,500,000 hits per day) launched in mid December 2005. The Squiz solution helped homesite.com.au to be twice awarded as the most popular house and garden website in Australia. These awards are recognition of the site’s depth of information and ease of use.

realestate.com.au - a new challenge

When realestate.com.au purchased homesite.com.au in March 2007 the new challenge for Squiz was to come up with a fresh new design for realestate.com.au that would complement the good work already done with homesite.com.au. The new Squiz solution had to overcome the problems of having two different websites (homesite.com.au and realestate.com.au) while meeting the joint business requirements of 6,000,000 hits per day (with a 25% margin to allow for new server solutions). Additionally, the solution had to allow homesite.com.au content to be seamlessly reused on the renovate.realestate.com.au site.

homesite.com.au & realestate.com.au - the most complete real estate offering in Australia

In June 2007 Squiz finalised the implementation of a sophisticated architecture for the joint enterprise including 8 Matrix content pairs, 2 proxy servers, 1 dedicated CacheDB server, 1 Admin server, 1 dedicated Admin DB, 1 dedicated replication master. Not only is there extensive sharing of homesite.com.au content, this new high performance system is designed and hosted to be fail over safe. Only a total power failure of the hosting facility or severing of the main Internet connection could bring it down.

Prior to Squiz involvement there were some 271,000 unique browsers per month. By June 2007 the Squiz solution was serving information to 502,000 unique browsers per month at the rate of 634 searches per minute.

Today MySource Matrix is operated by 5 back end users who work full time on uploading and managing the content for thousands of products and hundreds of editorial articles. Together homesite.com.au and realestate.com.au provide the most complete online real estate offering in Australia by helping consumers through the property lifecycle of sharing, renting, buying, selling and renovating – and Squiz is there in the background, helping to make it happen.