nSiteBuilders is an active project under the ownership of Suarez & Simmons Inc. The website, nSiteBuilders.com, is an online service package designed for home builder companies of all sizes. The purpose of the application is to bring tools to the home builder that allow for accurately tracking and reporting upon competitor data.
Some of the types of data captured are:
- Geographic location of the competitor selling efforts in relation to any company selling effort.
- A consolidated database of home builders across the nation.
- Competitor “shop” information such as: pricing and sales, cancellations, lots remaining and more.
- Historical records for all data that can be easily perused through a single timeline slider.
In addition to competitor tracking tools, the application includes a powerhouse of internal company tools that allow each customer to modify the application to suit their particular business model and hierarchy. These tools include:
- The ability to model the business hierarchy and subsequent users by any means, be it departmental, geographic or anything.
- The ability to control the security access for every single user under your account and define what operations are permitted and those that are not permitted.
- The ability to brand the application to fit not only your corporate image, but even define the brands for sub division brands if desired.
Lets take a look at the various technologies employed to power nSiteBuilders.com.
jQuery was extensively utilized for large portion of the application’s interface. Features such as:- Nested Sortable drag and drop hierarchies.
- Tree based file view systems.
- Ajax supported sliders for navigating the application timeline without refreshing the page.
Google Maps API was leveraged for a large part of the application’s toolset. Innovative uses for the Google Maps system were implemented for uses such as:- Geocoding of all home builder selling efforts and communities.
- Reverse address lookup for any location worldwide.
- Competitor reporting based on geographical location and distance calculations.
Powerful usage of the PHP GD Library allows for user administrators to brand the nSiteBuilders application with their own logos.- To accommodate this, PHP manipulates the cache settings of the browser to reload the cache of the branded logo on the fly for all relative users to ensure that the new logos are applied immediately.
- The ability to change the CSS of the application’s interfaces lets the tool feel more identifiable with the client’s staff.
- And multiple brands can be applied to a single account specific to the client’s builder brands and their employees.
Other technologies employed:
- Maani XML Charts
- qTip jQuery Plugin
- FPDF for pdf generation
- Automated FTP Backup
- HTML2PDF for HTML to PDF conversion
- Cron Job services
- WURFL Mobile Device Detection
- Apache Mod Rewrite
- Subversion Version Control
- PHP IMAP for email/message Forawarding