Improvements that could be made to my Northern Ireland Property Tracking Website

26 Jan 2015

Having taken a look at my Property Tracking Web Site for  Northern Ireland http://www.propertytrackerni.co.uk over several months I have noticed that the lack of weightings does throw up some distracting results. For example Lack in Co. Fermanagh has become one the areas with the highest average prices simply due to the fact it has one property that is over 500,000 in value and this property happens to be a site.

Now I do categorize properties as detached, semi- detached, sites etc so I could pull sites out but that would defeat the purpose. It does illustrate that weightings are pretty essential when carrying out this sort of analysis.

One thing that I am happy with is the use of http://refills.bourbon.io/ as the display technology. Using this I have immediately could a website that looks professional and can be used to automatically generate templates for the pages within the application. It is alot more lightweight than Bootstrap and having viewed my website on my mobile seems to give a basic level of responsive design to the site straight out of the box. I am somewhat surprised that Bootstrap seems to be used to such a large extent when you get so much for free using Bourbon Refills. It reminds me a little bit of the automatic screens in Oracle Apex https://apex.oracle.com/i/ only you are not limited to the Oracle concept of using Pl/SQL everywhere. In ThoughtBot's Bourbon you also have lot of controls that have an iOS feel as well.

So in terms of the look of the site I am pretty happy. In terms of maintaining this site, well I have found web scraping apps will always require some work. My source site made some changes to their site in December and this resulted in some changes needing to be made to my interface code. This is something that could not be improved unless I abandoned the idea of pulling data from another site and used a public domain dataset.

Published on 26 Jan 2015 Find me on Twitter!