The site looked quite bare without any photos to enhance the advertisements placed. Not what I had envisioned for Property Trading Place. Going back to Alex we thought we discovered the security breach, changed the chmod values (change mode – dealing with permissions to upload texts and images for advertisers) and I started promoting again to get the site filled with image content.

By this time I’d gotten a line in with a Internet specialist in Croatia, Louis. Together we would design a generic template that would be used for Property Trading Placeand which he could resell to other real estate companies or agents (therefore costing me nothing). It started getting technical now. I install what is called a Virtual Machine so that I can run Linuxon my Windows system. Louis connects his system to mine and we start designing. Ah, finally, I can do something myself on this. I thought. This hits another dead-end as Louis gets caught up in other projects and I am left with too limited knowledge to be able to get anything that even remotely works. And just for the fun of it, the operational site gets hacked again of all its images and there goes all my promotional work of the past months. Is this really meant to be???

This was enough head-knocking to take a step back and look at what I was doing wrong. Each of these attempts were made with non-financial commitments. And each had failed, and as a result I could see that this project required a level of complexity and scope that were much greater than anticipated, and which needed financing to really be able to do properly. That was too bad as I was hoping to be able to beat the system – yet I had to admit that it ended up beating me (up).

This change of operation prompted me to look for a competent Internet design company having experience with real estate sites – for which I would be willing to arrange financing. With the idea to have more control over the content, I focused on CMS sites. And as I was fed up with complicated sites, I typed in “easyCMS real estate.” On the fourth position was Navegabem’sCMS Real Estate Demo Siteto which I surfed. And I was amazed!!! The simplicty, the lines and overall intuitive design of this demo site was exactly what I had been looking for these years. It looked like my search for a design and programming partner had finally reached a proper end.

Continued in “Part IV: Why another real estate and property portal?”