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Dublin Coastal Development a LOT Slicker Than Funda.ie
Well I noticed today that with no fanfare the Funda Ireland website has gone live. Sort of a soft launch I think?
Look, I’m really, really sorry Funda, but I hope this isn’t the end product? Come on? After the great viral I know you have to have something else for us?
Well I suppose I’ll have to give them the benefit of the doubt for the moment. Their site obviously wasn’t ready in time (the help page is a bit of a laugh).
Maybe after watching that video I was expecting to get bells and whistles galore and some strong unique site features to attract home buyers.
Well it’s all very basic (especially when compared with funda.nl). I’m a wee bit surprised and somewhat disappointed to be honest. The dutch are well known for their JS coders, and those page refreshes onSelect of county/city are ugly. In fairness, the detailed views aren’t too bad, but again a bit of spiffing up with some JS and DOM scripting would make the user experience a whole lot better.
Curiously (for me anyway), Funda.ie don’t bother with the page title (unless they hope to rank for ‘Detail’) and file name structure is going to make it extremely hard to get the site indexed. (Come on, I had to get in something about the SEO!)
I did notice that Funda are looking for both a lead and a developer so I’m sure the website will improve soon.
Oh, and I’m still waiting for the big surprise follow-through that gets us all talking about Funda Ireland and not Dublin Coastal Development. Please don’t let me down Funda.
[Edit - Jason Roe has also been blogging about Funda and the Dublin Coastal Development and has conducted one or two experiments to rank for related key phrases.]
Apparently the launch was short-lived and the site is once again a placeholder page. The launch date is September 25?? Further delays are just eating into the ROI on that €30,000 viral campaign.
I have to admit I feel for Funda and do wish them the best with their launch. Thank you Funda for the wonderful viral and great case-study material.
Comment by Richard Hearne — October 2, 2006 @ 9:03 am
Well, delays to any sort of new site is a regular occurance. If you take the old ad maxim that editorial coverage is worth three times the price of conventional advertising, then funda.ie is well ahead in that particular race.
Comment by Jimmy_smithy — October 2, 2006 @ 3:26 pm
I have to agree with you about the value of editorial coverage Jummy_smithy, but I wonder how much of that coverage relates to Funda as opposed to Dublin Coastal Development?
The Funda.ie website will now be live October 2. I do hope they get the recognition they deserve for the great viral. I’m just not willing to bet the house on that outcome.
Comment by Richard Hearne — October 2, 2006 @ 7:45 pm
Well it’s the 3rd and the site hasn’t gone live yet. Eeep! The impact of their viral campaign is waining by the day I reckon. I wonder will it measure up to HuntForProperty.ie from an accessibility and SEO perspective? Although it seems Daft and MyHome already have this market wrapped up.
Comment by MoJo — October 4, 2006 @ 7:56 pm
Hi MoJo
It’s an extremely tough niche and not having the site live for people to make the connection certainly isn’t helping.
Thanks for posting your thoughts.
Regards
Richard
Comment by Richard Hearne — October 4, 2006 @ 8:08 pm
Funda.ie is now live (I think it went up last week sometime. It looks pretty good, the mapping is a lot cooler than myhome at any rate.
Comment by Jimmy_smithy — October 27, 2006 @ 6:04 pm
Wouldn’t be a huge fan to be honest. Design-wise it’s plain at best, ugly at worst. From a mark-up point-of-view, it’s showing up a lot of stubborn validation errors that could be fixed without having any bearing on functionality. From an SEO perspective, they really need to do some work – ‘Search Sale’ as a title on the homepage, ‘Detail’ as a title on the property landing pages. Not great for Google. Why do they have a funda.ie ad on the homepage of… funda.ie? There ARE some nice features there but it’s all been done before.
Comment by Mojo — October 27, 2006 @ 6:19 pm
I’m sure they’re going to have some teething problems initially and hopefully they will iron out the issues mentioned by Mojo.
One usability issue that strikes me instantly is the dead end you get when you click on ‘funda desk’. The prominent background on that homepage link is bound to attract users to click. Having to use the back button to navigate out is just asking people to leave the site IMO.
Great that they’re live though – best of luck Funda!
Comment by Richard Hearne — October 27, 2006 @ 7:23 pm
The site was developed by Irish company Arekibo.
Comment by llenno — March 2, 2007 @ 1:03 pm