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GetDevDone’s reach extends far and wide. We serve a diverse clientele that includes digital and marketing agencies, S&MBs, large enterprises, and other types of businesses.
Each client brings unique challenges, often requiring bespoke solutions that range in complexity and scope. While many of our projects fit within a small to medium framework, there are times when we receive requests for websites that can take years to develop.
Today, we want to share our experience building a “long-playing” project just like that—a sophisticated WordPress-based online platform for an Australian company. We started working on it around a year ago and are still developing it.
This project showcases our ability to manage complex projects over extended periods, efficiently allocating resources and time using Agile methodologies for the best results.
Let’s dive into the details.
The Client
Aus Flying is a premier Australian platform for hiring and purchasing aircraft. They cater to a wide range of aviation needs, offering a diverse selection of planes for hire and sale across various locations, including major airports like Melbourne Essendon and Sydney Bankstown.
Their services connect pilots with available aircraft, making it easy to find the right fit for any flying requirement. Aus Flying also provides free listings for aircraft owners looking to sell or rent out their planes, ensuring a comprehensive and user-friendly experience for both buyers and sellers in the aviation community.
The Challenge
The owner of Aus Flying, Mike Nash, turned to us for assistance with the development of an online platform where pilots could hire aircraft by location or manufacturer, and plane owners list their aircraft for hire or sale.
The client wanted us to use WordPress as the content management system. Initially, he provided us with the designs of the essential pages so that we could make and launch an MVP as quickly as possible.
While the website’s aesthetics were important, too, it was the functionality that defined the success of the entire project. Specifically, Mike requested the following features and capabilities:
- Listing planes for hire or sale.
- Editing or updating details of planes listed for hire or sale.
- Saving incomplete listings so that users can finish them at a later time.
- Uploading images for a plane gallery with a drag-and-drop functionality to arrange images in a specific order, as well as selecting the main image of a plane and adding 360° images to see the plane’s panoramic view.
- Browsing aircraft listings with the ability to delete them quickly or change their status to draft.
- Sending messages to aircraft owners.
- Viewing incoming messages in the admin panel (for aircraft owners).
- Login and registration.
- Profile editing.
- Comprehensive filtering, with every taxonomy having its own filter page.
- LIsting locations and makes with a link to the corresponding filter pages.
- A map showing aircraft in various regions and airports with pin auto grouping on zooming out.
Creating all that varied and complex functionality was clearly not a matter of days or even months. So, the client picked the features he wanted us to develop in the first place.
The Solution
To handle the Aus Flying project, we put together a team of experienced professionals, which included:
- A front-end developer to convert the client’s designs into pixel-perfect web pages.
- A WordPress developer to integrate those pages into the CMS.
- A QA engineer to perform comprehensive testing of the website.
- A dedicated Project Manager to oversee the entire work.
As we use the Scrum framework in our development process, we worked in sprints, which first included creating new pages and modules and later updates to certain pages and functionality as well.
Let’s overview the most notable features of the Aus Flying platform that our team has developed so far. We’ll divide them into two broad categories: For Pilots and For Aircraft Owners.
For Pilots
Homepage
The homepage is made up of several sections.
Hero section with a Quick Search form
The hero section contains a search form that pilots can use to find various aircraft for purchase and hire quickly. The form has two tabs, Hire and Buy, with slightly different search parameters. For example, the Buy tab includes the Model field, whereas Hire doesn’t.
Clicking the Search button takes you to the respective Search results page.
Sell your aircraft and List an aircraft for hire buttons
Below the search form, there are two buttons: Sell your aircraft and List an aircraft for hire. These represent a convenient way to jump straight to the dashboard where aircraft owners can list their planes for sale or hire respectively.
Featured aircraft for hire
The next section contains several identical-looking cards with key details about the featured aircraft that pilots can hire, including the plane’s image, model, manufacturer, price, and two buttons — More Info and Contact Owner.
Clicking More Info takes you to the corresponding aircraft page with more detailed information about the plane. The Contact Owner button opens a contact form, which we implemented as a lightbox popup using the WordPress plugin Contact Form 7. Through the form, pilots can send a message to the plane’s owner.
Below the last row, you’ll find the Show all aircraft for hire button that leads to the Search results page with all of the currently available aircraft you can hire.
Featured aircraft for sale
This is the final section of the homepage, which is almost identical to the previous one. By clicking the Show all aircraft for sale button, you land on the corresponding Search results page with the details about all of the planes that are selling.
Aircraft for hire filter page
You can access the Aircraft for hire filter page either from the homepage or from the main navigation menu. It provides multiple ways for pilots to filter the planes:
- By search radius
- By price range
- By manufacturer (implemented as an accordion)
- By location (implemented as an accordion)
The filter also includes a ‘Search again‘ feature for more refined searches if the initial results were unsatisfactory.
Additionally, you can sort out the aircraft by date (oldest or newest first) and by price (low or high first). If you need to run another search with different parameters, you can delete the previous ones by clicking the Clear all link.
Hire by location page
The Hire by location page is a convenient way to find aircraft in specific airports where they are currently stationed.
First, click either the View list or View map tab to choose how you want to view locations—as a list or as pins on an interactive map.
Then, select a specific state by clicking the corresponding tab with an abbreviation such as QLD. Notice how the active tab is painted blue.
If you pick the list viewing mode, the page automatically scrolls down to the state that you’ve picked with the locations of the planes and their number.
Clicking on a location takes you to the filter page for that particular place. If there’re several planes, you can additionally filter and sort them by the same parameters as on the Aircraft for hire filter page.
If you choose the View map option, you land on a map with locations indicated by red circles with a number inside. The circles turn into pins on zooming in and back into circles on zooming out. That’s the pin auto grouping feature the client requested.
When you click on a pin, a list of planes in that location slides smoothly in from right to left, shrinking the map’s frame and shifting the map inside the frame to the left.
Clicking on a plane from the list takes you to the respective details page with a photo gallery, the description of the plane, certifications, a map, and a contact form where pilots can leave a message for the plane’s owner.
Hire by manufacturers page
This page, in essence, is a collection of links to the Aircraft for hire search results page with the same filter functionality. Each manufacturer comes with the number of planes indicated to the right of the link.
These numbers change dynamically. For example, if the number is currently 2, and a listing is deleted in the dashboard, the number becomes 1 automatically.
Aircraft for sale filter page
You can access this page from the top navigation menu.
The filter on this page is more detailed compared to the one on the Aircraft for hire filter page. It includes these fields:
- Price, with a handy slider you can drag from both ends.
- Region
- Location
- Make
- Model
- Sale type
- Engine type
- Year from and Year to dropdowns
- Other
You can also pick who you want to purchase aircraft from—a private person, a dealer, or both—by selecting the respective checkboxes Private and/or Dealer at the bottom of the filter.
For Aircraft Owners
The Aus Flying platform also offers an easy way for aircraft owners to add and manage listings of planes for hire or sale. Here’s what we did to make that a reality.
Registration and Login Functionality
First, we created the signup and login functionality. Every user who wants to sell or rent out their aircraft must be properly registered. We implemented the registration form as a lightbox popup using the Theme My Login plugin. We also integrated the reCAPTCHA service to prevent robots from filling out the form.
Upon successful registration, the user’s profile is created within the system.
The login form is a lightbox popup, too. The fields are checked for valid data entry with corresponding error messages displayed at the top of the form.
Profile Editing
Users can also edit their profiles, which was one of the client’s requirements. As you can see in the screenshot below, the Profile page contains fields, such as First name, Last name, Mobile, Email, and others, all of which can be edited.
Listing, Editing, and Deleting Planes for Hire and Sale
Once registered, users can go to the dashboard to list planes for hire or sale, update information about them, or remove listings altogether. You can access the dashboard either from the homepage by clicking the Sell your aircraft or List an aircraft for hire buttons, or from the top navigation menu.
Here’s the Create listing form that aircraft owners need to fill out to display their plane for hire. It involves two steps. First, the owner specifies the key details, such as the make, model, location, etc.
The field types include text boxes, text areas, dropdowns, and checkbox groups for the users’ maximum convenience.
The second step is creating an image gallery for the current listing. As the client requested, we added the drag-and-drop functionality for this purpose.
The plane’s owner can quickly add several photos of the aircraft and then click on a specific one to set it as the main image. It will be the first and largest one on the details page, like this one here:
The form for listing planes for sale is almost identical to the one above, except for several fields such as “Logbooks available and complete?”
After listing their aircraft for hire or sale, the account owner can go to the dashboard to see all of the active listings with the details they provided (make, model, airport, and so on).
The aircraft owner can also pause, edit, or delete a listing by clicking the corresponding button at the end of the row.
Also, notice the color indicators in the first column. These show the present status of each listing:
- Green for Live
- Yellow for Paused
- Blue for Unfinished
That’s a very convenient way to see the current statuses of all the listings at a glance.
Enquiries
In addition, aircraft owners can see the messages they’ve received from pilots in the handy Enquiries table with the corresponding details, including:
- Aircraft
- Date
- Message
A plane owner also automatically receives all messages to their registered email address. If they no longer need a message, they can delete it by clicking the Delete button in the last column.
The Outcome
The Aus Flying project is in progress. We’re refining and updating the existing modules to align with the company’s business needs.
While the final stages of the website development are still a way off, Aus Flying’s owner is very satisfied with our performance, quality, and smooth, real-time communication with the team.
Want to be our next happy client? Connect with us today.
