Dangerous Use of Offsite Links

Posted on June 28, 2007
Filed Under Real Estate News | 1 Comment

Consistent off site links and branding SUCK!

Its been almost a year now since I suggested that consistent offsite links on sites to be a bad thing. This morning while talking to an associate at the University, it was explained to me that many large firms are now removing links entirely from places like the footer and other redundant locations and simply providing a site map or internal content before the offsite link. Studies show that people do not click on footer links unless alternative options were not available. What does this do for ego tags and other types of ridiculous branding?

I’ve always had a gut feeling about this; and I’ve always had a bit of an attitude on the subject of branding links as well. I’ve rarely put my “Designed By ME” link in templates and sites I build limiting it to sites I’ve fixed and did not charge a person for. Often its insisted upon, otherwise I avoid the practice. Why?

The first reason is that there is no logical basis for doing so. Regardless of all the big fat liar ego excuses web designers give you; leaving links to designers sites does you more harm than good. It doesn’t help with the generation of more business for web designers and it does little more than provide an SE link to their site. I personally believe this would be better served by providing details about the site in the about us section of any project.

The second reason is that if studies are correct in saying people don’t click on the links at the footer than what makes a designer actually believe someone is going to come by and click their links? In the years I’ve been doing design work I’ve had fewer than 100 inquiries for design work as a result of footer links. Shitty sites not worthy of follow up? Nope, people just don’t click on those links and people who are competitors rarely have the balls to call up the very designer of their competitor and ask them to do work for them. So, when you compare that to the thousands of templates and sites that have either used my work and or been built by me, you can see that 100 is so trivial its almost non existent.

Wise business suggests that you scrap the footer links completely and opt instead for links to internal pages before exiting your site. If possible and you don’t violate the agreement with your designers then I’d suggest using the NO FOLLOW tag in the link to prevent any punitive consequences from search engines. If you can remove the link all together then by all means do it.

Solutions for Open Realty

Posted on June 27, 2007
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vTiger and Open Realty

Finally had a chance while waiting for my coder to look over the vTiger application in more depth. Good application and pretty easy to use but extremely heavy and slow on my server.

Taking the suggestion of the programmer I think the best solution for a bridge is no bridge at all but rather a simple user registration snippet that will add new registrants to the CRM would better serve those Realtors I’ve been talking to.

I’ll get this published freely for you to examine.

Open Realty - Joomla - CMS Realty

Posted on June 22, 2007
Filed Under Real Estate News | 1 Comment

Three simple things to consider in using CMS Realty

CMS Realty is a clever product designed to marry Open Realty with the Joomla CMS thereby providing a quasi integrated solution. But before you jump right into the idea of bringing them together, evaluate these three things.

Open Realty and Joomla user sharing

CMS Realty has a nice feature which bridges the necessity for users to register on two separate applications. The integrated feature provides a clean method for sharing users providing the installation of Joomla and Open Realty reside in the same database. Unless you need this type of user registration integration its best to keep them separate if for no other reason than keeping each application in its own database. I wont go into the exhaustive inventory of examples of why this is important.

Are SEF URL’s Important?

A truly unfortunate characteristic of using CMS Realty is the long session string URL’s that the component requires in order to maintain cross application functionality. Although a great contribution, CMS Realty suffers greatly when considered for serious or professional real estate website development. CMS Realty is an ideal tool for bringing Open Realty into Joomla (or Mambo) by providing the administrator with a nice clean means of managing both applications in one location. But this as well as other reasons fall painfully short of serious consideration based on URL’s alone.

Danger in double indexing and duplicate content

I get hired now and again to convert sites using CMS Realty to our method of integration which doesn’t rely on the bridge technique used by CMS Realty. Its not my position or objective to condemn the application by any means, but political correctness has almost nothing to do with the size and measure of your success and if bent on ranking both effectively and properly then alternatives should be considered.

One of the most dangerous facets of using CMS Realty for a professional web site is the ever present risk of duplicate content. As one site owner recently discovered, duplicate content forced his rank and status to all but fade from the search engines in just a few short weeks as a result of a small and otherwise harmless mistake that will take many months to rectify. The method by which this happens is fully innocent on the surface but avoidable if due diligence is applied. Simply by the addition of additional links in his site and the use of a site map addon for Open Realty, this site owner later discovered that not only were some listings being indexed via Joomla but the actual Open Realty install path with identical listings were also being indexed with different URL’s. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what happens next.

If you have a site that uses integrated characteristics like this then maybe considering an alternative method wherein you can still keep your user registration bridge would be advisable. The methods I’ve used on many CMS Realty conversions provides seamless integration and functionality with none of the potentially dangerous side effects of session length URL’s or risks of duplicate content and database bloat.

Open Realty For Realtors

Posted on June 22, 2007
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Open Realty - Listings Manager - Version 2.4.1

In the time I’ve been building sites for agents and brokerages, literally dozens of drive by short lived solutions surface on web application front only to vanish and never be revived again. From the very beginning, most web based real estate applications sought to provide some means of providing an intuitive way of publishing and displaying real estate listings. Although most freely available real estate listing scripts are little more than gallery tools, some seek to provide the kinds of features worthy of being considered professional grade solutions. With these professional grade solutions comes complexity in use and usually require extensive knowledge in things like server administration, dns, database design, and certainly a fundamental working knowledge of the scripting language used in its production.

Design and modification in most instances is a lofty chore for anyone not familiar with general programming and this keeps a good percentage of applications solely in the hands of well versed professionals. Design for the most part with many commercial solutions is quite literally a hard coded venture not unlike that required by osCommerce or early versions of many popular forum engines.

Hard coding, for lack of a better term, isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The absence of a template engine can increase the parsing speed of the code for greater performance. Our own UltimateIDX for example is about 90% inline coded layout and does require that we map each MLS individually before data mining can be used to provide MLS listings directly into Realtor sites. From my perspective, although I’d love something with a bit more form based control on the setup, is essentially very effective. Since our objective is to provide clean and seamless integration, it does take tenacity and great attention to detail to achieve this on a per site basis.

Applications that can provide an intuitive template engine, mission critical search engine features and an effective medium for presentation and management of listings are usually the realm of custom solutions. I’m certainly a fan of WordPress and Joomla among others that can be made to dance with finesse and elegance in ways that can win awards in real estate website design. Only one in the open source realm of real estate scripts comes armed and motivated to provide turnkey solutions with relative speed; Open Realty 2.4.1!

Template Design Engine

Template engines by ground level definition are little more than clever ways to parse code. PHP or PERL for instance are noted for being excellent handlers of text and are quite effective at text manipulation. PERL was specifically built with this characteristic in mind as its name depicts, Practical Extraction and Reporting Language. Template engines are text processors as the template engine produces output by replacing text with parsed code variables with specific values.

The Open Realty template engine is one of the more common types and is usually taught in most entry level php courses. Open Realty, like many similar applications, replaces what are called template tags with actual renderings of the applications core process. For instance a template tag that produces the browsers page title looks like this; {site_title}. When this tag is encountered, it is replaced at runtime with the contents specific to that tag. Open Realty has many dozens of such tags used to provide flexibility within reason to the designers vision of how the coders intention should look.

Its a common cliche that coders and designers rarely see eye to eye, not always for good reason naturally. Thus, template engines bridges the gap of reasoning between designers and coders by allowing the code developer to develop the application to function like it should and provide designers the means to make the application look like it should.

Open Realty templates are then simplified on the surface as any designer with entry level skill can quickly learn to adapt to this methodology of design and produce results that are effective as well as impressive for the Real Estate professionals.

Search Engine Benefits

Since I’ve already introduced the template tag, {site_title}, I’ll expand on this to a degree to explore the search engine benefits of using Open Realty for agent web sites. A truly impressive feature in Open Realty’s latest releases is the addition of variable and quite literally dynamic content for both meta descriptions and page titles. Each able to be defined from actual field contents in the Open Realty database, this feature opens an entire world of possibilities and control in building SEF SEO capable websites.

Are Meta Descriptions That Important? Its true that although search engines are downplaying meta tags to an ever decreasing level of importance, some older and more stubborn SE’s continue to include them in their algorithms. I decided to take middle road on this as do many who build websites and I still use key word tools when time and budget permits to produce meta descriptions. The mere fact that you have the option in Open Realty render arguments pro or conn moot since the use is quite literally discretionary. Your not required to use the feature for meta description but take comfort in knowing its available.

These key features in Open Realty coupled with SEF URL’s make ranking Open Realty sites a relatively deliberate act. Such gives you control over what you rank for in terms of terms and content. Well, sort of; the truth of the matter is no one controls what search engines index, it just sounded good to think that we as site owners and designers were in the control seat and not the assistant seat. Regardless of semantics, Open Realty features allow you to assist Google in ranking your site with these flexible features.

Only one characteristic stands out as confusing about the entire SEF features of Open Realty and that is the use of page titles with plus ( + ) sign separators. No other application I’ve encountered uses such methodology and quite honestly its a bit baffling. Most if not all SEF tools allow for the URL link structure to be presented in the more familiar format listing-title.html in lowercase and with hyphens as opposed to other symbols.

There is however a solution for the determined and that is to add a second listing title field in Open Realty’s Listing Template Editor where you would display the human readable title of the listing while reserving the default one for inclusion of-a-more-friendly-title.html Although beyond this post, I’ll be sure to document the process as time permits.

Listings Manager

Open Realty as I’ve said many times is essentially a gallery script with additional features for search and presentation of content items. Unlike the plugin now in beta for WordPress, Open Realty is a stand alone listing manager that can be easily adapted to suit other types of websites in need of an effective way to present a gallery of items.

The most common way Open Realty is used based on experience is in the area of agency opens or agency exclusive listings for example. Although Open Realty can be coerced to incorporate large data sets such as MLS inclusion via RETS or IDX; its not ideal for databases that number in excess of 10,000 listings on a shared hosting platform. To Open Realty’s credit, server resources do dictate in some part the outer limits of its ability to perform as MLS imports have exceeded 50,000 listings in a few instances I’m aware of.

As a listing manager Open Realty is as turnkey and effective as any application on the web can be for rapid deployment of real estate web sites. Contributions to the code base by third party developers keeps Open Realty ever evolving and ever climbing to new ground.

Given the fact that this new release of Open Realty features effective elements of design coupled with reasonably good search engine friendliness; Open Realty as a listing manager is an ideal tool for entry level to mid range real estate websites.

Rapid Template Design Series UPDATE

Posted on June 21, 2007
Filed Under Design | Leave a Comment

Working With Template Engines

Amazon.com, we love it, we use it, we buy from it; now we’re selling on it. As soon as Amazon approves our publishers outline on the RTDS, we’re that much closer. Amazon said they would evaluate and set the price accordingly (which is odd) and then provide it for sale as an instructional series.

Getting into college bookstores and instructors along with getting the ISBN and BarCode; well those things were easy. Getting content of this type approved by mainstream book stores and online book clubs is quite a different thing. They want that all important summary of what it is and what its intended to do. Its my fault entirely for running out to my blogs and other sites and publishing announcements prematurely. Its my fault entirely for taking what began as a free set of video tutorials and a small file collection and attempting to make it the jack of all trades which it naturally isn’t. So part of clarification we had to publish many of the key phrases I really wanted to use as supplementals under a category for working with template engines.

Joomla, Open Realty, CRELoaded, osCommerce, WordPress, among others were part of my intention to simply make them capable for stand alone template design packages. But now that has changed and they will be included as part of the series published in supplementals. Maybe in the future after this hurdle is jumped, I’ll look at making some small $20 variants specifically geared toward each of these applications.

So why am I ranting about this again? How annoying right?

Understand that this project has been my pet from the day I let the idea occupy my mind more than casually. Had I not started teaching at the community college part time, I’d likely have never come up with the idea to take this beyond the trivial. Now I’m committed; I either follow through or vanish this achievement into internet history as “the big announcement that never was”. I’ve sought and motivated colleagues to contribute (among others), and I’ve solicited investment based solely on my reputation thousands of dollars to pay for proper production audio and video equipment to produce a professional result. I’ve invested my own money along with the trivial grant given to us by the school for the foundation. A lot is on the line and I know this will be something that will be “arguably” affordable, yet important enough to have real utility value to a student of design.

All CSS Menu for CRELoaded

Posted on June 21, 2007
Filed Under Portfolio | Leave a Comment

Long have I wanted to take the menu we use in osCommerce templates and make it work for CRELoaded. Until recently I have had little incentive to do so because no one ever seems to ask for the feature or even take casual interest in it.

CoolMenu and DHTML Menu like effects

Javascript menu’s wont index in seach engines and the two most popular sub cat type cascading menus used in most shops are either the JS CoolMenu contribution or the Dynamic Drive DHTML Menu contribution, each of which is a JavaScript menu.

My idea was to take one of the stock cascading nav systems I have in my snippet db for oscommerce and create one that will both index well in search engines and function well like the popular JS menu types. You can see the contribution working in this example. http://www.livedemosite.com/demo/oscommerce/

Look for the feature in our CRELoaded template inventory that will be published on http://www.asiteabove.com

Joomla 1.5 Templates

Posted on June 21, 2007
Filed Under Design | 1 Comment

Will Commercial Templates Be Gone?

I STAND CORRECTED
Joomla 1.5 will in fact STAY as GNU/GPL as such rumors to the contrary had at one time floated about on the subject. Still after being corrected by a visitor today, the question that still remains is the debate over commercial components and additions to Joomla. Will these be required to follow Joomla’s religious adherence to the GPL guidelines?

Joomla has grown so fast over the past year that nearly every major computing industry magazine has commented on its diverse and rather explosive growth. Joomla is freeware as it stands and will continue to be such but the GPL license requirements may take a turn for the worse for third party component developers. Its being suggested that third party components will not be allowed to publish their products encrypted and commercialized for the new release of Joomla as of yet. What this does for design firms that sell drop in templates is semi cleared up in threads in the forums, but at the moment it looks like both GPL and NON will be accepted. The argument looks to be raging in the forums after looking moments ago and some feel its not fair that Joomla impose a mandate on component developers and not template developers.

I guess I stand back and conclude that In many ways the thousands of dollars I’ve spent in addition to the brutal terms we had to agree to with Amazon may in fact pay off then. Our course ware, the Rapid Template Design Series, does in fact feature a small section on CMS systems such as Joomla. What we cover in that section is how to take the central theme of the course which is visual design, and then instruct on how to apply it to various types of template engines such as Joomla, open-realty, creLoaded, oscommerce, or vBulletin for instance. Since its instructional and course ware, regardless of the final outcome I think we’re safe.

I’ll follow this actively now that a visitor was kind enough to point out the errors of my post and send me a set of links. Thank you Elin Waring for your corrections. I prefer to be accurate and your feedback helps.

All those free downloads?

Posted on June 19, 2007
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Templates, Files, Snippets and Addons

Well in response to a week full of email hearing people question the validity of the existence of these free templates I so frequently write about I’m going to jump the gun. I decided to double time it, work more than I realistically should, even though I’ve explained more than a dozen times across many blogs and forums that I’m neck deep in contracted design work and have NO TIME for my own personal stuff. However I’m understanding and its not an un-realistic request of people so I’m posting things for download.

I’ve taken my new blog design and the new Brokers Edge design out of the project folders, cut them apart in Photoshop and doing the CSS layout.

Lots of Real Estate sites

Posted on June 18, 2007
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Missouri Real Estate Sites

The Brokers Edge handed down what I call the short list of sites that are in active completion. I’ll be sure to publish these mid range design examples for your evaluation naturally. These designs I call mid range because they are not entry level turn key designs and they are not fully custom either.

These sites are based on my personal inventory of Open-Realty layouts that were modified and feature enhanced with some SEF features I’m not going to reveal at this point. One would think its bull shit to go and say that there are any SEF secrets left in design but I promise you this much. Although that may be relatively true its not actually true. There are design techniques that we pick up on over time that make us scratch our heads as to why search engine ranking increases almost overnight while others plummet just as quick.

I wont second guess Google algorithms and I wont second guess MSN or Yahoo’s either. But some things are so painfully obvious I often wonder if I’d feel right pointing them out for fear of being wrong. You may understand my point when you consider when anyone makes any new assumption or expression, that person literally puts his neck on the line. I’m all for pushing design, arrogantly and and boldly but I’m no SEO expert so I tend to proceed cautiously with our discoveries and these sites in question have certainly experienced overnight, top of the search engine, indexed because of these things.

I already shared with you the unbelievable growth in traffic and indexing rank of an OpenRealty site after adding a simple thing like an XML generator for the site map. That was part of the story naturally but I’m certain it was a turning point addition to the site that made it possible to rank overnight at such great speed.

Anyway back to work on The Brokers Edge.

Private Label Applications

Posted on June 18, 2007
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CSS Navigation Generator - Color Manager

Today after working with Mark Panovia (Computer Science Instructor) and Justin Green (Desktop Publishing Instructor), we hashed out a few final edits to the Rapid Template Design Series. The printers as mentioned before will begin production sometime in August for the Fall Semester and the course will first be published in Washington State colleges then nationally if everything works well.

I wrote this post http://www.jaredritchey.com/rapid-template-design-series.html regarding the series a few weeks ago and as far as features goes nothing there has changed.

We did manage to convince a few freeware application developers to private label their applications and include some of our features and characteristics to better accommodate the course. Naturally since these are freeware and or shareware applications, they will be available for FREE download on http://www.templatedesignkit.com in compliance with the developers free distribution licenses.

Designer Tools of The Trade

So with the CSS Navigation Generator, the pending code snippet tool, the color wheel manager and hopefully a font manager among others, the course will deliver a lofty arsenal of tools to the student designer.

Since the focus of the course is for the student, ease of learning is critical and the right tools can make that experience easier. For years professionals in the design business have attempted to standardize many things including the tools of the trade. Starting in the early days with Adobe Page Maker or Quark Express for example, the first forms of instruction were not easy and rarely included layout guides and templates. Books and manuals produced by experts familiar with the applications, a dilemma surfaces, as documentation is written in technical terms by technical experts that quite literally require you to be very technical to understand it. For a student this catch 22 has long since been identified as problematic when course material makes broad assumptions of understanding.

The Rapid Template Design Series really shouldn’t have the name “Template” in it but templates are in fact foundation to nearly all design. Print, web, application interfaces, among other things follows a set of guides for optimal results. Because of this, those like us who have worked in the print media industry tend understand the use of complex grids and layout guides used to achieve consistency in our work. The same is also true of web design, and now that the term “Template” is synonymous with design layout, Rapid Template Design seems relevant because its familiar.

So only a few tiny little things, aside from desperate need more ca$h for the budget and a few holdouts on private labeling, we are close to making this a reality.

FYI the original budget that the college provided was a grant in the amount of ONLY $2,500 which was eaten up quickly for the plugins and code elements we had to purchase distribution licenses for. Thankfully many contributors and code providers to this course traded link and advertising space for their form of compensation. I’m fully grateful to the people at Utteraccess.com, Joomla, Mambo, Open-Realty, vBulletin, php.net, WordPress, and countless others that authorized use of their contribution and assisted to bring about this course. Special thanks to Adobe for the donation of 8 licenses of Adobe Photoshop CS, Adobe Dreamweaver and Adobe InDesign Tools like these are instrumental to modern design processes.

Learn to Be A Design Professional

I’ve not really expanded on the target audience of this course so a brief mention would be beneficial. This course as mentioned on the college blog was created for entry level to intermediate level design students who seek mastery of the foundational or should I say fundamentals of design. This course is NOT for professional designers as much of it covers very mundane theories on color, layout and navigation in great depth. A lofty inventory of core elements is also provided including template layout masters, css contributions and code, working files, and private label software most professionals have already accumulated in knowledge and inventory alike. So this course is for students of design.

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