Real Estate Agency Website in Spain
The multilingual nature of the web resource allows you to significantly expand the scope of your interests and enter new sales markets. It was for the development of multilingualism that the real estate agency «Estate Barcelona» turned to us. They already had a high-quality and working site in Russian on the Bitrix platform, so it was decided not to complicate the work, but to use the platform’s tools to develop full-fledged pages with competent content in English and Spanish.
Later, the client also wanted to integrate a tool for generating PDF documentation and ZIP archives with photos on the site.
About the company
Agency «Estate Barcelona» specializes in the sale of residential and commercial real estate, as well as the implementation of investment projects in Spain. The company provides a full range of services in the field of real estate purchase, investment, trust management, immigration and registration of a residence permit.
Agency specialists also solve additional issues related to the acquisition and management of real estate. They accompany clients not only in the process of choosing and buying real estate, but also provide after-sales services. The agency offers a whole range of services that require the possession and handling of large amounts of information. That is why it was decided to integrate the automatic generation of PDF documentation and ZIP archives on the web resource.
Implementation of multilingualism
Multilingualism is the ability to optimize a web resource so that people from different countries receive the same content in a language they understand. But as our experience shows, it is not enough to upload multilingual articles. It is necessary to translate not only text blocks, but the entire site: menus, links, and SEO data of each page. Information shown to a visitor from anywhere in the world in another language must be complete and of high quality.
In our case, the site is located on subdomains with a common database. That is, most pages have their own independent translations (static pages), and objects have different language properties that are displayed depending on the language. Translation into English and Spanish was made and added to the resource manually.
This is how our customer’s web resource is displayed in different languages:
PDF generation
After the successful implementation of multilingualism, the client wanted to increase the functionality of their Internet resource by generating PDF documents. How this functionality is useful:
- it is possible to quickly generate price lists of offers;
- generate all the necessary information about the object in one document;
- issue invoices;
- form diplomas, certificates, etc.;
- makes it possible to conveniently store and print the necessary information.
In our case, the client needed to generate their cards in the form of PDF and quickly create full-fledged catalogs.
The generation of PDF documents on any site begins with the search for a library that can provide this feature. Since the resource works in PHP, the library should also be selected in PHP.
The TCPDF library is an open source PHP library for instantly generating PDF documents that includes full support for Unicode UTF-8. The library is very easy to use and has many settings, and is also included in many popular CMS and frameworks. In our case, this library has become the most suitable option.
This is what a PDF document with the most necessary information about a property looks like:
Generation of ZIP archives
The next step in improving the functionality of the site was the automatic creation of a ZIP archive with photos. It is much easier to handle large volumes of information when it is possible to use archives rather than individual files. The customer wanted to create a zip archive with images related to the construction site at the push of a button. It was necessary to place such buttons in the public part and the administrative panel.
We used Bitrix to integrate with the admin panel interface and to access images. PHP tools (ZipArchive class) were used to create the archive.
Problems encountered in the work process
It was important for us that the archives opened correctly on both desktop and mobile devices. As it turned out during testing, the archive on mobile devices with the IOS operating system did not open correctly.
Solution
Due to the peculiarities of the IOS architecture, we had to add all the necessary headers to describe the generated file. Given the Bitrix architecture, the code was placed inside the bitrix/php_interface shared folder, which made it available to all sites.
After the work was carried out by us, the site administrator had the opportunity to quickly create archives with photographs of real estate objects of interest to clients and promptly send them to any device.
This is what the offer looks like on the website:
And this is how the ZIP archive with photos looks like:
Summary
As a result of our work, the client received an improved website with the following functionality:
- customers from anywhere in the world can view content in their preferred language;
- visitors can independently generate PDF files with the real estate options they are interested in;
- the administrator has the ability to quickly and easily create entire collections and catalogs from suitable offers;
- an automatically generated zip-archive allows site managers to quickly provide photos of product cards in a compressed format.
Today we continue fruitful cooperation with the real estate agency «Estate Barcelona» to improve and optimize the work of the web resource. We are confident that this cooperation will benefit the client and the experience of our company.
This is not the first time we perform IT work for real estate agencies and have already studied the needs of the market and the necessary tools in this area quite well. Therefore, feel free to contact our specialists for professional advice and optimal solutions.
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