Secret hideout found on property website

So while having lunch I decided to idle time surfing a few property websites.

Found myself looking at Irish property for comparative research, when I happened to note an interesting location on one of the pages:

Someone should inform the Garda about this? ;)

More seriously, though, there are some nasty little formatting errors on the page that you’d think PropertyNews would look to fixing.

Trouble is, I think some of these property websites are run by people so far removed from the internet process that they remain dangerously ignorant of the flaws in their systems.

The most glaring example I came across was surfing in Internet Explorer, I found your-move.co.uk wouldn’t load up. This occured over a few weeks, so I concluded that the company was in trouble and the website in its final death throes.

Then I decided to take a peek at the page code.

They’d set up a meta-refresh on the index page to redirect to the inner CMS. Only they’d missed out on the opening commas. Firefox was forgiving, IE not.

And it was weeks before a helpful email from myself helped them fix it.

Imagine that - losing 90% of your main business traffic due to a single missing comma?

I’m looking very seriously at developing a property portal for the UK - I already have the forums, and can set up a news section. It’s the property sales section that’s going to be the big headache.

The big lesson from the bigger property sites is to keep a very close eye on the overall coding. I wouldn’t want to accidentally do a your-move.