Your Business At Stake

By Daira Winkler
Posted Monday, August 2, 2004

We do believe in healthy sense of paranoia. Not the paranoia, which makes us feverishly try to distinguish ourselves from our competitors, but the paranoia, which makes us feel the iron hand of competition and gives us the stimulus to constantly develop and improve.

It is difficult to survive in the media, where everybody claims he is the best and where somebody is indeed better than you. It prompted us the idea of carrying out a kind of analysis of the products offered on the Web, similar to Esvon Classifieds. In no shape of form, we are going to judge or criticize the web applications, listed below.

The search engine has brought us to the following software products:

(http://www.interactivetools.com/products/realtymanager/)

The first impression is that Realty Manager is quite a professional solution. Scanning the pages, and studying this product more carefully we learn that the script is realized using Perl and text files and its functionality is really worth being paid for. PHP/MySQL and Perl/text files solutions don’t have any distinction in kind when it comes to their functionality. But PHP code is more consistent and modular and it runs faster. The advantage of PHP is also the ubiquity of web server platforms supporting PHP and MySQL. Fact: Over 25% of the internet's web sites are running PHP and nearly 63% of the internet's web sites are running the Apache web server, so give it a thought.

Those, who have encountered the problem of a script running slowly, probably know, that the faster grows your database of users, the slower your script works. In the end, it just breaks. (it happens because it is based on text files). Thus, such solution can be used only when the web site you are going to build is simple.

Moreover, with their license you are not allowed to edit scripts; it can be a disaster for you when you want to customize your solution.

The web site itself is very informative; it seems to give the overall description of the application. In general, this software script is enough if your web portal needs don’t go far. Yet, it is quite simple and friendly but has much fewer functions than Esvon Classfieds does.

(http://www.mojoscripts.com/products/mojoestate/index.shtml)

The web site layout and the product presentation resemble a bit the previous one. The application is Perl/MySQL solution, which however costs less. The price, as we have already indicated, is not a No.1 factor for making decision. But $199 seems nevertheless too little for a powerful script with “tons of features”.

MojoEstate includes a lot of features: internal mailbox system, saved search system, multimedia file gallery, advanced admin and member panels, powerful search facility, detailed who-is-online display, auto-generated thumbnails for uploaded images, etc.

We won’t enumerate all the product features, described at the web site. When a visitor reads the content, it is often enough for him to know what is described. But developers and more competent users know that it’s just a surface. When it comes to the product in action, they might face with the problem of handling extreme amounts of traffic the database queries, which can bring your server down. Some customers just may skip this peculiarity.

The product is also presented in a well-structured manner and seems to be a good cost-effective solution for budget-minded people.

(http://www.smartisoft.com/products.php?product=phpBazar)

We see that the script manufacturers have preferred PHP code in this case. As we have already mentioned, we also consider it to be better for such kind of applications in view of its open source technology and the fact that it is firmly implanted in the LAMP family (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) of open source web development platform technologies.

The given page describes the product features. It is a long and detailed five-scroll list. The demo is actually well presented, yet has an erotic shadow. If you are looking for a PHP script to build exactly this kind of web portal, then you are all set. But if you are in search for a program, say, for a real estate site, such demo confuses a bit… Driven by common sense you get back and click “I am not over 18”. I was a bit taken aback when I was redirected to a disney web site.

(http://www.e-classifieds.net/products/index.html)

We should surmise that this solution looks professional. The abundant choice of editions is a good prove to it. Still, the researches show, that the bigger the selection is, the more difficult it is to make a decision. And it is really so. Say, you decide that you need one solution and proceed to the following edition to make sure you did not skip the features that are necessary to your online business. And it turns out that you did. You change the decision. While you proceed to the third one, you might discover that it has the features of the second edition, but lacks for the features of the first. You feel frustrated.

Yet, you can see the demo of every edition directly without filling in any web form before it. It contributes to the web site popularity and makes the product more available.

The script is also realized using Perl and text files and the customer support of the manufacturer costs $75 - $100 per hour. Maybe this rate is the confirmation that the company really guarantees an irreproachable performance of their product, and you won’t have to refer to them too often; but support is required more often than you might think, since the situations differ.

(http://www.esvon.com/products/cl/)

Of course, we do pay attention to what the program looks like, but its internal mechanism does play a great role. The Esvon specialists have seen to this. You can’t see it, but you can be sure Esvon Classifieds script runs well and allows you to avoid the typical problems, the web applications owners might encounter.

The well thought out and powerful script, its modularity and flexibility are the best qualities distinguished by our customers. It is difficult, however, to judge ourselves, thus, we will enumerate the features, which were marked by our customers as practically unique in comparison to other similar solutions:

Static HTML pages generation allows you to have the fast web site, indexed in search engines by more keywords and much more accessible to web surfers.

The script allows you to handle much more site traffic/visitors queries, then other existing applications; the fast running PHP code is also marked as an important peculiarity of the program. Just as an example, Esvon Classifieds has unique category tree building engine: it is very fast, with only 2 SQL queries to build an unlimited-level category tree with ads amount per category calculation; it will ensure you that your server won’t be brought down by amount of database queries executed!

While we were preparing this article, we received one more email from our customer, where he compares our product with GeoClassifieds (http://geodesicsolutions.com/products/index.htm), and marks the following features as award winning in Esvon Classifieds: template system, Gd or imagemagick thumbnail images, very good support, reviews writing and voting, blocks engine, absolutely custom database fields settings.

(http://geodesicsolutions.com/products/index.htm)

GeoDesic product features are very attractive. Here it is: the case, when you should go deeper. A typical user can claim that it doesn’t matter, what’s inside; it just should work and do what he expects from it. But the deeper approach reveals, that the script is not able to process properly growing database queries, its templates are not very flexible, it runs slow and it is unable to generate static content.

Using such script you take risk to be very soon removed from the shared web server, since your traffic might exceed the maximum allowed server load limit very quickly.

Thus, be meticulous while choosing the script fro your online business.

We hope, that this analysis has contributed to your knowledge of what you are looking for on the Web. In the end, you decide, we just help you to see deeper; we hope that we do.

About The Author
Daria Winkler is Co-founder and Principal of Esvon LLC (http://www.esvon.com/) information technology company, providing cost effective software development and outsourcing services to our clients and professional classified ads software for website owners.
alina@esvon.com