Bolton OpondoContext
Sollou Realtors is a Kenyan real-estate business offering property sales, rentals and advisory. I implemented and extended its website on WordPress, building on an existing real-estate theme rather than starting from scratch.
Problem
The business needed a site that presents its brand and properties well on any device, helps people find the right property, lets customers manage their own listings, and can be maintained safely once it is live.
My contribution
- Branding and responsive design: adapted the business pages, navigation, contact details, team profiles and property presentation for desktop and mobile.
- Property search: made sale and rental filters and bedroom ranges return the right results, and made Kenyan locations and neighbourhoods easier to choose.
- Customer listings: extended the customer dashboard with simpler submission forms, image-upload validation and permissions scoped to each customer's own properties.
- Accounts: made account flows dependable alongside the site's caching, with clearer feedback and branded account emails.
- Search visibility: added page metadata, social previews and structured business data, and kept private and demo pages out of search results.
- Testing and delivery: added automated browser tests for desktop and mobile, PHP syntax checks and safe test-data cleanup, and documented deployment, backups and recovery.
Technical approach
Custom behaviour lives in a child theme, so the underlying theme can still be updated without losing it. Where the theme already had a feature, such as the customer dashboard, I extended it rather than replacing it. Playwright regression tests cover the main journeys on desktop and mobile, so changes to a live business site can be checked before they ship.
Challenges and trade-offs
- Working within an existing theme: extending its behaviour without forking it meant understanding how it worked before changing anything.
- Caching: account and search features had to behave correctly on cached pages, not only on a fresh request.
- A live site: changes went to production selectively, with backups and a documented recovery path, so the business was not disrupted.
Outcome
The site is live at sollourealtors.com, with automated regression tests and documented procedures for deployment, backups and recovery to support ongoing maintenance.
Reflection
On an established platform, the valuable work is in careful extension: keeping customisations separate from the theme, and adding tests and recovery procedures so a business can keep changing its live site safely.