your business at stake

(c) by Daria Winkler

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 ext 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.