Find was a joint venture between myself and two collegues that intends to satisfy a niche in the Guernsey market. Many websites exist throughout the UK that offer used cars, estate agents and property etc. but with Guernsey having difficult import/export issues as well as being isoldated from the point of view of commuting – a customer from Guernsey has very little use of UK wide searches.

I was responsilbe for the core design of the site functionality as well as all of the development and some design. The site is implemented using Ruby on Rails and allows for individual customers, as well as companies to list a wide range of items on the site for a small fee. We attempted to create a vibrant and easy to use brand that included some leading edge functionality – such as alerting you by email as soon as items are added that match your searches.

Other innovative features include saving items to your shortlist, which can contain items from any category – as well as automatic posting to twitter, ability to share/like on facebook – see multiple images for a listing and download PDFs.

From a sellers point of view, they are capable of listing their own items and paying for the listings through paypal – without the need of dealing directly with the site owners. For business users we ensured that payment could be done by invoice and plan at a later stage to be able to integrate the site with existing data sources – thus enabling business users to be completely hands-off with the site admin.

As well as including the core functionality for listing, maintaining, searching and finding items the site includes a complete blog that follows the convention of categories, dated archives and tags. A few extra items were included, to try to encourage visitors – such as Guernsey weather forecasts, surf reports and an aggregation of various Guernsey and Channel Island news sources.

In the initial period after release we have seen steadily gowing traffic and have high hopes that find will become Guernsey’s premier website for Guernsey Property, Used Cars, Finance and more.