What can you tell us about the team that built ideal-builders.com?

Reusser Design is a small but dynamic web development and digital marketing firm in Northeast Indiana. We’re passionate about making useful, dynamic, powerful, and visually stunning websites.

Aaron Bushnell is our lead designer and developer, and he worked with Andy Fought for web development, and Beth Stoller for content strategy. Our CMS of choice is ExpressionEngine, because of its power, flexibility, and ease of use.

What can you tell us about the site in general? What are the goals of the site and the main audience?

We knew that we were going have many different visitors needing varying amounts of information. Some knew the price and wanted to pick out a community. Some knew what community they wanted to browse homes in, but needed to look at floor plans. Others knew what realtor they wanted to use, and needed to find a price range. Rather than concentrate on just one or two of these user profiles and accommodating their intentions, we wanted something that would work for everyone!

So, we started mapping out a system with a highly-connected relationship matrix for its data: Realtors, prices, floor plans, locations, communities, and more. On top of that, they needed something highly visual with an eye-catching design. We got some amazing snapshots of these homes, and launched into building this site!

What was your major consideration in using ExpressionEngine for this?

ExpressionEngine is a great, dynamic content management system. Since it doesn’t make any assumptions about the data being entered into it, we didn’t have to limit the client’s final product.

Having custom content types allows us to ask only for the important information and then display that data on the site in numerous locations automatically. It, simply, allows the client to spend less time in the CMS and more time focused on their business.

Were there any Commercial Add-ons that proved useful? If so, which ones? How did they help?

The two big add-ons that enhanced this site are Solspace’s Super Search and Pixel and Tonic’s Playa.

Super Search helped us create a filtering system when looking for a new home. You can search homes with numerous parameters like the number of bedrooms and bathrooms, square footage, agent, community, and much more.

Playa helped us to make numerous entry relationships. Brandon made it ridiculously easy to relate agents to homes, homes to communities, floor plans to communities, and a whole lot more. Playa helped us to make these relationships simply, quickly, and it enhanced the site ten-fold. We can’t brag on Playa enough.

Did you do any custom add-on development?

We didn’t do much of any custom add-on development, actually. This should speak volumes about how awesome ExpressionEngine community is. They’ve done much of the hard work on our behalf.

We did have to slightly tweak pagination on our AJAX-based forms, but it was surprisingly simple. Rather than use a traditional page-method we simply appended the next page’s results to the current page.

What is next on the plate for ideal-builders.com? Any additional functionality you can tell us about?

We don’t have any immediate plans for Ideal Suburban Homes at this time. However, we built it to be flexible because we’d like to further enhance the site when the time comes.

Do you have any other information you’d like to share with the community? Tips from this project you’d like to share? Lessons you’ve learned?

We dove into this site thinking, “We’re soon-to-be and current homeowners, how do we want this site to work?”. Ultimately things needed to be fast, easy, and convenient to the user.

We chose to use AJAX when we could because it makes a great user experience and makes a web site feel more like a web application. If you’ve never utilized AJAX, don’t be afraid, check out the awesome Malsup’s jQuery Form Plugin.

We used Super Search with the Form Plugin to create the home filtering system. We thought this would be useful to the community so we created a tutorial on building an AJAX-based Super Search.

We’d like to stress that you should never be afraid to stretch ExpressionEngine’s (and your own) potential. Because of the possibilities, you can create something really functional and elegant at the same time.