FindMi

The Client

FindMi is a UK-based online listing directory company dedicated to helping customers find local businesses fast. They offer local businesses several different types of advertising opportunities, from simple business listings to attractive dedicated pages with additional functionalities such as business reviews or promotional videos.

They also offer local British businesses many different types of advertising and subscription levels to get their business noticed.

This was a huge opportunity for both us at Brace and our client to work on an exciting development project with challenges and with such a large scope.

The Website

One of the biggest obstacles for the Brace website development team to overcome was that FindMi required customers to be able to search and find listings local to them amongst almost 1 million and rising business listings on the website, all being done so in an instant. We knew any issues with loading times would result in users leaving the website.

To make this work, we had to ensure the website was built on a platform was lean enough to cope with not only the number of listings and searches but also with potentially a huge number of visitors who may flock to the site at any point.

We also put in place best practice measures that ensure that images and integrated videos would load quickly and make a customer’s journey as smooth as possible on a website which holds a lot of data.

the brief

The client’s brief included:
• To customise listings themselves according to which listing level businesses chosen to and which advertising options they had chosen.
• The ability to insert up to a possible 2 million business listings overall.
• Our advice on how to maintain and grow their website so that it would be able to hold this level of information and remain fully interactive for the customer.
• A smooth and user-friendly website design, with images which encourage the customer to dive in and get searching.

We knew this project was going to be ambitious, however we were able to accommodate the client.

Technical Specifications

• We built this custom website using the MERN Stack and specifically on React with Next JS to develop the functionality the client required.
• The search feature uses externalthe Google Maps Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)API, which returns longitudinal and latitudinal co-ordinates based on the chosen search location to return results based on the searchers’ locationlocal listings to that location.
• The images on the website utilizes uses aAWS S3 Content Delivery Network (CDN) to serve images from servers close to the customer to reduce loading times.
• We allowed for the embedding of YouTube videos on listings. U– users can paste in the URL of their video link and we format &and we embed the URL via their IP address for you on the video direct to their listing. This can be any video if it is via YouTube’s platform.
• We have also used a “Serverless Image Handler” to resize images on the fly alongside a CDN for faster loading times. This has led to a reduction in load on the servers, especially during peak performance times.