Homesk: Eleven Years of a Public Site Without a Rebuild
A site covering renting, buying, letting and selling, built in 2015 and carried on ever since. Here the timespan is the point.
Services Used
The situation
Homesk brokers and manages property. In 2015 the public site was due, and my responsibility was exactly that web part: a site that has to serve rental listings, sales listings, letting and selling at the same time, with a detail page per property and a path from listing to enquiry. It was part of a larger system landscape being built in parallel by a second developer.
The solution
I built the first public site as a standalone ASP.NET MVC application, with thirteen areas from renting and buying through search and search orders to contact and legal texts. In 2015 responsive behaviour was not yet standard, so I retrofitted navigation, tiles, image and video containers and the property detail pages step by step, checking each result. In early 2016 the site moved into the main application. There I carried the presentation layer for nine years: the letting, private landlord, property management, selling, renting, buying, blog and home areas, plus the shared layout and part of the API connection to the services behind it. In 2020 I restructured the main navigation and added sections whose visibility depends on the visitor's permissions.
The result
The site has been running since 2015 without interruption, eleven years without a single rebuild. The first version is 97 percent my own work, and I carried the presentation layer of its successor for nine years while the company's requirements changed several times. The engagement continues, and the next step is set: once the back office is finished, the site will be rebuilt and will draw its data from there.