Thread: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and Singapore Rooms and Apartments

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and Singapore Rooms and Apartments

Roomlah: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Brunei and Singapore classifieds for room, house or apartment rental

I've been working at this first series of websites the whole past month, after purchasing a developer license:

Check it out: ROOMLAH

(bahasa malay translation coming up next week)

at the moment there are available classifieds websites for room and apartment renting in:

Singapore
Kuala Lumpur
Malaysia
Brunei

I'm working to extend the network to many other cities - soon I'll get to work some of my developers to create some special functions for it

I'm also thinking I should update the design - there are too many classipress websites that are too much look a like... luckily my gf is a talented web designer she will help so I won't need to bother any designer for this

I'm also about to launch a large job classified network and another type of classified network inspired to the same style

It's not going bad since it has been online just by a month or so... I plan soon to run a good adsense campaign... and possibly a facebook one... it's gonna cost, but I think it's worth it

join the facebook page if you're happy with it and wanna give some support

Roomlah on Facebook

any comments, advices or suggestions are welcome
thanks

Re: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and Singapore Rooms and Apartments

That looks really great, and great idea to connect them all that way! Also, very lucky about your gf being a web designer

Re: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and Singapore Rooms and Apartments

I Love it!
I love the continuity between the 4 sites though making them personalized a bit to match the city / geo-location they are for would make it a tad more inviting.
Are you connecting them in any way, that is with database/user accounts or anything or are they completely seperate?

I was thinking of doing somethign similar where you could see the full canadian classified site that i will be launching or view listings by province, but ultimately everything would be on one website.

Re: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and Singapore Rooms and Apartments

Very neat! Some of the customization looks similar to our site . Anyway great to know another Malaysian site. You can contact us for more co-operation

Re: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and Singapore Rooms and Apartments

@Malaysiads - I just PM you

@groan - No I chose not to connect the databases; it would have been technically possible though and I thought about it... but I chose not to do that because on some websites I will have differences and the server load should be more optimized this way. Also it would have took a lot more work to tweak WP database for that. And I'm not sure how classipress performs under WPMU (can a contributor/CP registered user become a contributor for all blogs hosted under WPMU? I don't think so...). So the only drawback is that you have to re-register if you want to post on other websites too, but it's unlikely to bother people; most of them choose to not register and when they do they usually publish ad(s) in one single country. For your canadian website... perhaps you could put some filters in the loop and show only certain cities/states to certain people.

Re: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and Singapore Rooms and Apartments

@groan have a look at this: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/320970 it's not very hard thing to... perhaps I should upgrade as well

Re: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and Singapore Rooms and Apartments

Really like the implementation of Walkscore and the way you put the custom fields together on the ad form.

I am thinking of possibly replacing the current google map with Walkscore since my site is real estate based as well.

Re: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and Singapore Rooms and Apartments

Just one caveat to think about as a designer, page load. Google is now using page load time as one of their factors in how high you rank in their search engine.

I see more and more sites now that have loaded themselves up with widgets to add Google maps and Follow Me and Twitter Me and Feed Me out here and there...blah blah.

You are already asking your server to contact your database and run filters to pull up an display not only records but to also retrieve multiple images and then there are the PHP functions being loaded and run. When you also load each page with all kinds of additional HTTP calls to other servers scattered around the world then your pages must also wait until all your widgets have loaded too.

And browsers generally do not display anything but a blank white page until the last widget has been loaded from somewhere halfway around the world. Think of all the code that must stream back and forth to produce two different Google maps for each listing. One showing a map view, one calculating a Walking route.

Many times, even though I have the fastest DSL service in Austria, I will go to a website, even commercial media sites, and it takes forever to load a simple page because they have loaded it with ads, tracking analytics, widgets, maps, feeds that I can't see.... even though the browser is blank...if I go to source code view I can see that the entire HTML code has already arrived...but my browser refuses to display anything at all until every last image, even an invisible little tracking gif has been downloaded.

If you also add tracking code so you can use analytics then your page will not load in the viewer's browsers until that code has executed back and forth from the analytics server...on and on.

So, I am just saying that for some of your viewers the time it takes to load your site, page by page, becomes too agonizing a wait to stay with you.

Less is more truly in today's internet environment. Don't get carried away with too many functions clogging up the bandwidth between your server and the viewer.

Re: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and Singapore Rooms and Apartments

Simply awesome! I love each and every one of the changes you've made and I think I'll apply some similar modification on my site, it is certainly a good reference .. great job!

On the negative side I think that Vienna is right, every time google gives more importance to the load time of sites, your site is sometimes a little slow. I recommend using this online tool so you can see the results, in my opinion is a very useful tool and has helped me a lot.

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

Regards

Re: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and Singapore Rooms and Apartments

Awesome customization.

what are you using to translate the pages to different languages?

Vic