Our company, a major West Coast real estate firm, developed software several years ago to help high-end customers design, price, and collect bids on custom homes. The idea never took off the way we had intended, but we believe some of the concepts from that project—and hopefully some of the actual software—can be adapted to serve an even bigger market on the Internet. Our idea is to create a "Design Your Dream House" Web site that allows consumers to start with one of several basic designs, change options within the design constraints specified by the program, and match the house to the topography of available lots. Our existing software produces a fairly realistic architectural design rendering that's sufficient for soliciting initial bids. When this process results in a real homebuilding contract, we will collect a commission. However, because we don't get paid at all unless there is a sale, our incentive will be to assist the customer in finding the low bid that will convince him or her to follow this process through to a contract. We need help adapting a Win32 user interface to the Web architecture. We own the Visual Basic code that drives the wizards for selecting a home design, but the visual representationsforthose designs are provided by third-party COM components. A major question is whether we can expect to migrate any significant fraction of this system to a Windows-based server and reuse it in a Web context, or whether we must migrate to another platform. We have retained three of the original developers, one of whom has some experience with C++ programming for Unix in addition to his VB skills. We also need to decide the best way to preserve capabilities such as drag-and-drop in a Web context without excluding too many users who don't have the latest and greatest browser. Because users may work on their home designs a little at a time over a period of weeks or months, they will need to be able to save their work and retrieve it during a later session.
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