One of the things I have been doing is creating single dealer sites with 68C (several posts about that). It has worked well. The first big trial was with property in france . This is a site aimed at English speakers looking to buy French properties (its a niche market). It takes an xml feed from the estate agent's in house system and uploads the property listings with associated images in one go - no manual intervention is necessary. This makes life very easy for everyone. The site contains some 800 property listings on it and it takes about an hour to load. The XML feed gets loaded every few days as new properties are taken on the agent's books and some properties come off. The system can also export xml feeds too making it possible to clone the site or parts of it very easily for certain geographical areas (my next project - build out by category). The market is not so big for English speakers (perhaps 100k searches a month in total across all search engines) but surprisingly competitive. Still, every lead generated pays as an email is sent to both myself and the estate agent. Its a different business model but one which seems to work in this industry and under the local legislation (no sales are being made but leads are being generated - its paid advertising). Its a model like free listings but you get paid on email contacts being made (success). All that being said, what I really wanted to do was to have a French language site being the prime market of course for French property. Searches made are in the millions each month but of course it is even more competitive. Making the French site (the static parts) is easy (a translation job - easy with 68C language files) but the problem to overcome for my customer/partner was that the listings (the true dynamic content) are in English. The agent I work with does not not have an xml feed in French and does not really wish to make one either given the effort and mucking about with his in house system. It is taking him ages to translate each property held in it. In fact he does not wish to do it. However he does want French customers (quite typical really - wants something without doing any work for it). Well I found a solution and that was to automatically translate the feed just before the database gets loaded from the feed. Sure the machine translation is not fantastic 100% but it is good enough for purpose. The result is a mirror site all in French - Immobilier Sud Ouest. What makes this interesting is that it requires no manual intervention or hand translation of adverts. It is all seamless. Moreover, it is not just the typical translate the whole page which search engines know all about or bits of it on the fly (generally not a lot of credit is given). Instead, the database itself has the entries already translated. Each page appears like a static url with static content with original content. Anyone interested in similar things then feel free to email me.
