This week we launched our own Property Tax Calculator. The Daft.ie calculator is a simple tool that calculates property value based on location, number of bedrooms and bathrooms, and whether the property has a garden or not.
It allows you to input more information than the official Revenue.ie calculator. We believe this makes it a good alternative for estimating the value of your home.
Following the redesign of our property details page earlier this year, we are now very happy to reveal a new look for our homepage, search forms and search results pages!
As with our recent redesign of our property details page, one of our main aims here was to achieve a more modern look and feel, while continuing to highlight our most important and popular features.
Our homepage now has a neater, fresher look. We've made a few subtle changes, which we feel gives the page a cleaner look, allowing you to more easily focus on the useful information on the page.
We have launched our new redesigned property details page across the site.
A lot has changed! Aesthetically, it looks fresher with a cleaner layout. Our Developers have been working feverishly over the last few months to achieve a different, functional, contemporary look.
Here is a snapshot of improvements.
The first thing you notice is that the property photographs take centre stage on the page. The first image is larger with the introduction of thumbnails beneath. You can take a look inside the property and see if it's the one for you. So, remember photographs are of utmost importance!
We have made the ‘Contact Advertiser’ details more visible to the right of the photographs. There is also a text box to email the Advertiser.
Also made more visible are functions 'Save Ad', 'Share with Friends', 'Print this Page' and 'Report this Ad'
For the many tweeters among us- we have made it more visible on the top right hand side to tweet and share the ad on Facebook
The introduction of tabs has made it easier to evaluate the property in one fowl swoop. In the property overview tab, you can get the key details of the property at a quick glance and see where it's located. If you want to go in to more detail on the property, clicking "Show more information" will show you all of the description which the advertiser has shared, which could be anything from details of the local area right down to the measurements of the en-suite bathroom! Maneuvering across, there is Map, Street View and Other Properties in the Area. Always a handy feature if the property in question is not suitable.
We hope this makes life easier for you and you find our new design easier on the eye!
As always, we welcome all feedback!
A common request we've gotten from users in the past has been to enable our Map Search feature for all properties, not just those for sale. So, when we were chosen by Google to be one of the official launch partners for Google Streetview in Ireland, we decided it was finally time to overhaul our current system with something more modern and available to all properties. This overhaul started with the map on each property's page and has now been rolled out to the full map search.
We're delighted to announce that this week we've released touch.daft.ie, a version of Daft.ie optimised for iPhone and Android-powered mobile phones.
Over the last year we've seen a huge increase in traffic to Daft.ie from mobile devices. Traffic from smartphones to Daft has increased by over 230% since November of last year! And this figure doesn't include the traffic coming from the Daft iPhone app or iPad app.
We've had a mobile version of Daft available at http://m.daft.ie for several years now. It was originally aimed at WAP-enabled mobile phones, so it has very few images, and is designed for a fast download over a slow mobile connection. In the last couple of years the launch of the iPhone and Android-powered phones has meant that many mobile phones are now capable of handling a much richer browsing experience.
With this in mind we set out to build a version of the site which still loads quickly on a mobile connection, but provides a much richer browsing experience than the previous mobile site.
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Just a quick post to let you know that we've enabled QR codes on all our links. In order to create a QR code for a Daft URL all you have to do is replace the 'www' in the URL with a 'qr'.
So what's a QR code?
A QR Code is a 2D barcode that is readable by QR scanners, mobile phones with a camera and smartphones (there are loads of free QR apps available for both Android & iPhone phones). The code consists of black modules arranged in a square pattern on white background. The information encoded can be text, URL or other data. There's more info on the history of QR codes over on wikipedia.
So what's this got to do with Daft?
We've made it very easy to convert a link on Daft into a QR code that contains the URL, to use this feature just swap out the 'www' part of the URL with 'qr', this will enable you to print a QR code that links directly to your property or your search.
e.g. http://www.daft.ie/searchsale.daft?id=557389 -> http://qr.daft.ie/searchsale.daft?id=557389
Here's an interesting post that details how different companies are using QR codes.
Have fun!
Ciarán
@ciaranmaher
Daft has just made it easier for you to find your dream home online!
We've just added an exciting feature to our maps called Google Street View - a 360 degree street-level view of properties, towns, neighbourhoods and streets in Ireland.
If you’re looking for a place to buy or rent, Street View immerses you in the property location, at ground level. You can move up and down streets, or look around you in 360 degree panoramas giving you a feel for the property and the area.
You can virtually explore neighbourhoods and navigate to individual homes and amenities like shops, schools, dry cleaners and bus stops. You can even check out nearby landmarks to help with driving directions to the property!
...or so the saying goes, well now we've made it easier for you to let your pictures do the talking as we've rolled out a new image uploading feature to all our advertisers.
You no longer have to upload your pictures one at a time - it's now possible to attach multiple images at once. You can also rearrange the order of the pictures, add a caption and we've also added a progress bar, to show you file by file uploading progress. Here are a few screenshots to show how the new process works.
