RateJab

RateJab is a company that helps home buyers to find the best deal to get a mortgage when purchasing a new home or refinancing an existing mortgage.

Our client has reached us with the need to redesign the existing website in order to make it more easy to use and fully editable. The main idea was to use Wordpress platform adding some customization to make the process of requiring the contact more engaging for a home buyer.

The buyer has two options under the website "buy" or "refinance". In case you want to buy, the system will allow you to select the state you are looking to buy from and show you the recent lean closing on that particular state. You fill out the information and the process is continued by the RateJab experts. If you want to refinance your home, the site asks you for the zip code and shows you the county with all the recent lean closing in that area.

When the contact is submit, the system will notify the experts and send you via SMS the phone number of the company to be in touch.

Development phase

We've started with a fresh install of Wordpress and then we have installed and customized a theme to match given web design. We have to implement a mobile version of the site based on it. We added dynamic widgets and custom post types to allow to the client to modify the text in display and titles on the site. 

In order to display the recent loan on the front page, we have integrated Google Map API. This is allowing admin users to select all zip codes from the administration to be loaded directly on the map when the visitor search from a specific location. We took advantages of the Google Map custom module and we have made some tweaks based on our client request. The front map page was optimized based on the standards and recommendation to be loading as fast as possible on every device.

Also we created a custom plugin to integrate Twilio service and ContactForm7 plugin we have used for contact page. This also allows administrator users to configure from which field get the phone number (field name) and write a text for the SMS to be sent when a new visitor perform a submission.

We have worked based on main SEO recommendation from the beginning. We put special attention to entire optimization work, adding all tools needed to have a good starting point for positioning on major search engine results (Google, Bing, Yahoo and more).

We have also worked on several details to be able to call by clicking on the telephone number (from smartphones) internal search based on keywords, featured images inside blog posts. We also integrate social media options, to share with a click any content on social networks.

Finally, we have deployed and configured the website on a new live server under Amazon AWS using Apache, PHP and MySQL.

Technologies

• Amazon AWS: Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon.com that provides on-demand cloud computing platforms to individuals, companies and governments
• Wordpress: WordPress is a free and open-source content management system based on PHP and MySQL. To function, WordPress has to be installed on a web server, which would either be part of an Internet hosting service or a network host in its own right..
• Bootstrap 3: HTML5+CSS3+Javascript framework that provides tools for building dynamic user interfaces compatible with all modern browsers.
• Google Maps API: Platform for integrating Google Maps and automating each map according to the needs of the website
• Twilio API: Platform for automating SMS sending
• Gulp: JavaScript task runner for automating tasks
• SCSS: CSS style sheet preprocessor