New Feature Release: Improved Saved Homes Lists

Improved Saved Care and Nursing Home List

After the successfully release of our new saved homes list we have improved upon the current offering by adding more data to the comparison table and adding the telephone number to the bottom home list.

You can click the link to call the home and if a suitable handler is found it will use that program to make the call so if you use a SIP phone you can call them directly from your PC. We use tel: prefix inside the href of the a tag which indicates to modern browsers that it is a telephone number.

We have added more rows to the comparison table so it now shows a homes specialisms in a quick easy to read format. We have red x to convey it is not offered and a green tick to show the service is offered.

For icons we discovered a nice set of free open images which you can find at this site. We are currently considering moving our icon set over to theirs so we can standardise our images making them look more uniform and consistent.

Our hope is that these improvements help our visitors make a decision between a list of candidate homes.

Saved Home List

Care Home Supplier Directory

Free Supplier Listings

Recently we have been working on a new section for our website which we feel will integrate nicely and is relevant to our sector and will provide our visitors with a useful service.

The service provides free listings for providers of services and products in the care sector so they can connect with care and nursing home owners. You can find the sign up form for this service by following this link.

Supplies

Service Features

Our initial version provides all the base functionality we feel is needed for the service and we have plans for future versions to add even more functionality to the system.

Signup is free to all businesses and once you login to our panel you can create the content for your new listing and also upload your companies logo (1Mb in size).

You can add your social media links, email address, telephone, fax and more we currently support Google+, Facebook and Twitter.

Screen Shots

Below are some screen shot of the service the first one is the listing editor located in the supplier control panel. This allows users to add content to their page and manage their logo image. Our editor is similar to an office document editor and is simple to use.

Listing Editor

The main listings page is shown in the below screenshot this is the homepage for the supplier directory and it lists the current suppliers. We plan on adding some promotional areas to the layout of this page at a future date.

Suppliers Page

Final screen shot is the actual listing page for the supplier, we allow a single supplier per single account. Each single supplier gets a listing page which they can edit using the online editor via their browser.

Listing Page

Feedback

All user feed back is appreciated and we would welcome working with a supplier to improve the service even more. If you would like to send feedback or participate in improving your listing please contact us using this form and we will email you back. You could also contact me using Google+.

Conclusion

With the release of our new service we hope to connect care and nursing homes with suppliers who can provide them with quality services and/or products.

As with all software this will be an iterative development cycle trying to add specific features one at a time. We hope to build a great service for our visitors.

Visitor Care and Nursing Home Lists

Allowing Visitors to Save Personal Lists

Our  most recent release has added support for allowing visitors to save care homes and agencies to their own personal list of homes which can then be compared and viewed at a later date.

Saving Lists

To save a home the visitor clicks the Save Home link highlighted red in the screen shot below this link has an onclick handler registered to run the add method which contains the JavaScript for saving.

Town Listing with Save Link

HomeList.js provides all the client side functionality we need and it is this class which implements the add method mentioned above. We also make use of an external class name uuid.core.js which we use to generate a UUID for each visitor.

Our UUID uses version 4 of the UUID specification which can be found here we decided to use an existing implementation because if you look at the code I dont think it can be done any better.

We save this UUID in a cookie for two months and all homes added to a visitor list are deleted after seven days. Another constraint we have is that a visitor can only save 20 items to their list.

Listing Page with Save Link

Visitors can also add homes to their list from the actual listing page of the home which is highlighted red in the picture above.

Viewing Lists

Visitors can view their own lists by clicking the View Saved Homes link which is located in the top left corner of all pages and is highlighted red in the screen shot below. This link uses the top and right CSS properties with a position of absolute.

The current version only allows certain comparisons but we plan on increasing what you can compare and also select only what you want to see in later versions.

Visitor List

Conclusion

This feature has already been well accepted by our visitors and we are currently monitoring its usage and hope to improve the service even more in the future.

We also released a number of other features with this release and we will be writing about them in future postings so stay tuned.

New Feature Release: Local Amenity Map Markers

Showing Local Business on Maps

With the release of our local amenities listings we thought it would be good for our visitors to be able to visualise an amenities proximity to the home. This also complements our feature for displaying other homes on the map.

For homes we use the same red marker as used previously but for local amenities we use a blue marker allowing the user to easily differentiate between the two.

Map with Amenities

Our map implementation uses the Google Maps API v3 which is the current version we had to port the basic functionality over from v2 when support for it stopped. We have a basic class representing this along side our other custom Google classes.

We also make use of a custom API to fetch the data used to populate the map with markers and a separate library to handle all the map JavaScript.

Next we plan to add some more map controls and layers to aid our visitors and improve upon their experience which is one of our main goals.

New Feature Release: Improved Maps

Better Info Windows Markers and More

Our first release of the year and we have new improved maps for homes using the Google Maps v3 API we now have support for info windows for each home, new style markers, improved titles and improvements to the JavaScript library.

We have a follow up version in development now to provide markers for local amenities by allowing map layers using a checkbox control. This will allow our visitors to get an idea of were the local points of interest are.

Map With Markers