NetOptions a division of Datacom, the largest independent, professional IT services provider in Australasia, announced today details of the innovative web site they built for Australian Publishing’s new online success; Search4cars.

NetOptions created a new generation site using Open Standards such as AJAX a browser technology that loads content without full page refreshes, PHP a general purpose scripting language, and MySQL database technology, in a very tight three month time frame. Australian Publishing launched the new Search4cars site on 13th November in the Northern Australian area from Coffs Harbour to Mackay including metropolitan Brisbane, but not the city, leveraging Australian Publishing’s strength with its more than 100 publications up the East Coast of NSW and Queensland.

“We wanted to build a new generation site that advantaged three parties; the buyer, the seller and ourselves, and this we achieved,” said Jamie Powell, general manager of Australian Publishing online sales and development. The buyer has a powerful and friendly web site that is incredibly fast, easy to search and intuitive, the seller, who if a motor dealer, has a system that integrates with his own inventory and management system allowing Search4cars to be an extension of their business and for us it does not require IT staff to load material and manage the back end, it is entirely “all user” friendly,” he added.

Australian Publishing selected NetOptions after an extensive review of six submissions, allowing three months for the system to be built. “We were looking for a firm that could build an application ‘Search4’ engine for us, one that could be used holistically across all our sites, whether cars, jobs or classifieds,” said Jamie. “NetOptions came highly recommended to us and we had prior experience working with the parent company, Datacom in New Zealand with Australian Publishing’s New Zealand Herald. We liked the idea of using Open Source software tools like AJAX and PHP that kept costs to a minimum while increasing functionality and performance.”

NetOptions used their open source expertise to assist Australian Publishing in designing and building this new generation web site,” said Craig Sergeant Software Architect at NetOptions. “With the short time available to us we dedicated our entire open source development team to the project and have been pleased with the results. Using tools like AJAX allows instant step by step data field updates without total screen refreshing so limiting bandwidth requirements, a boon for regional Queensland users, and PHP allows easy back room reports and data entry without skilled staff. We also had a vastly experienced Google team in New Zealand that we were able to call on to assist our local developers resulting in a very powerful search function,” he added.

Australian Publishing also elected to outsource the hosting of the Search4cars site to NetOptions partner company Datacom in Melbourne. “This was another advantage of working with NetOptions and the entire Datacom team,” said Jamie.

“Since going live a few weeks ago we have seen an immediate adoption of the site throughout the East coast of Queensland. We have just over half of all the dealers signed up and have 5,500 cars in stock, with an expectation of 25,000 by March. The powerful search capability, individual field refresh and powerful back end has made Search4cars a real progression in web page development. We thank NetOptions and the Datacom team for their support, we look forward to taking this site Australia wide.” said Jamie.

Australian Publishing expects to roll out more Search4 vertical exchanges around Australia shortly using the same NetOptions developed Open Standards software solution.