Real Estate Websites

Posted on June 13, 2007
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“Real Estate Websites”

Forget all you have assumed about Real Estate Website development and consider just a few quick pointers.

70% of all home buyers search for their home online

According to a wide variety of webmaster guru’s on the web, as much as 70% of all new homes being sold were first searched for and reviewed on the internet.

Home buyers search on an average of 5 websites

A San Diego Realtor I spoke with said that his site retains more people per statistical capita than the national norm. According to experts, the average home buyer searches for listings on 5 separate sites before taking action and contacting a Realtor. My client states that three simple sentences can retain home shoppers on your website long enough to take action. Details on The Brokers Edge.

Home buyers want details, but you wont provide them

Studies show that many people seeking to locate a home online usually wont bother to register on a site unless they can benefit from a specific call to action. Techniques most commonly employed by Realtors is to provide listings with only partial details on homes and properties where additional information can be seen once registered. The call to action, “register to see address” or other details seeks to weed out curiosity seekers and increase the agents chances at more qualified prospects. Other incentives to registration include free documents and or guides that have a perceived or special value to be made only to registered members. I’ll cover this in the article “Top 10 prospect generators” next week on The Brokers Edge.

People judge a book by its cover

I’m the first to admit I’ve seen tragically ugly sites pull in millions in sales while graphically beautiful sites sit stagnant and eventually die. Such is almost cliché but none the less true as we see sites that are tragic to look at, generate unbelievable sales volumes. Does appearance matter? I think the reason simple sites are so appealing is they are not overwhelming and you can always spot someone trying to overdue it when they make their real estate site look more like a portal or the jack of all trades. Such sites are almost never successful.

Attractive designs however are usually perceived as high quality and tend to depict authority from appearance and rich informative content. Maybe the key to good design is as simple as that ugly site but as beautiful as, well, that beautiful site. Don’t you love it when a plan comes together.

I’ll be writing on this and FSBO marketing success on The Brokers Edge.

CSS Menus Design Generator

Posted on June 13, 2007
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CSS Horizontal and Vertical Menus

Don’t you wish there was a nice little tool to generate truly valid CSS Menus? Well soon a new application will be freely available on the main Template Design Kit website located at http://www.templatedesignkit.com.

I’ll have more details and screen shots by mid week next week which will feature the better half of 50 different menu types some of which would be generated for Joomla and OSCommerce.

FREE Open Realty 2.4.1 Templates

Posted on June 13, 2007
Filed Under Real Estate News | 3 Comments

Open Realty Software Templates

With the new release of the patched version of Open Realty 2.4.1 the FREE inventory was tested to make sure there were no template inconsistencies. You can find templates for sale and free download on http://www.thebrokersedge.com/ As I’ve said before the templates were to be uploaded by the time I get the new design in place.

Custom Open Realty Templates 2.4.1

Custom designs are also being provided on limited distribution terms since the house photos I purchased for them are rather expensive for an unlimited license so its one of those deals where I but a few and publish even fewer.

I’m still open for custom designs so feel free to drop me a line.

Saving your life with regular backups

Posted on June 13, 2007
Filed Under Design | 2 Comments

Windows Backup Steps I take

So last night my system got nailed by a virus or some other bug which totally pissed me off because I was right in the middle of finishing up my network and ready to deliver some project files to a client when WHAM! The sinking feeling in your gut and then the red faced annoyance that I just lost the last 6 hours worth of work for the most part. Yeah panic is what I use to do but experience with such things teaches many lessons.

I don’t run automated backup tools (although I should) because they always seem to slow my machine down so I do everything manually. So, I’m going to briefly outline my simple steps to saving myself from tragedy many times over. Now keep in mind. A good tool to have is good solid backup device like tape drive or external drive and I’m guilty for not using either all the time.

I tend to follow a basic routine when it comes to backups. I have three hard drives available, one of which is external via USB2. Here are my little steps.
1) I run a windows batch file every morning that simply copies several files to the secondary hard drive (FileZilla.xml, my bookmarks for IE and FF, My code snippet DB, my DreamWeaver snippets, my Flash Snippets, my email PST backup, and my chat logs)
2) I always drag and drop large client project files into folders with an underscore on my secondary drive. _clientname/ for example. Why the underscore? because it shows up above all other folders.
3) Once every night I make a WinRar Zip of each client folder simply overwriting the existing one. I do this because in the event of a serious system issue I can quickly run KNOPPIX from my DVD drive and use the FTP feature to simply upload the client folders to one of our servers or the local machines on the network with ease before I try to repair any problems. BTW KNOPPIX i
4) DVD backups religiously. Get a copy of http://www.zero2000.com/cd-catalog-expert/index.html
$30 is absolutely no money when compared to ease of locating your data across dozens or even hundreds of media types.
5) Last I make sure I keep passwords, license numbers for software, and all mission critical elements logged into a simple hard bound journal I got from Office Depot for $14. I can’t tell you how many times I need a password for something I rarely use only to waste time searching when I can have it at my fingertips in moments. This very reason is why I’ll be building a simple stand alone VB application to store such things.

There it is, fast and dirty.

WordPress Documentation Tips and Tricks

Posted on June 12, 2007
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WordPress 2.2 Template Documentation / Themes

After spending a few hours on the phone with my programmer I finally hashed out the format for making a cleaner form of documentation that absolute newbe’s can follow and my only concern is where to place it. I have about a dozen domains I own and administer and I administer or moderate about 12 forums around the web as a favor to the site owners but I want this set of tutorials and documentation elements presented in a site that centralizes the ideology and spirit of open source.

I use to own OpenSourceU.org which I quickly abandoned and I’ve though long about having a centralized tutorial resource for all types of applications I tend to work with and I figure the best place to put this is on my new domain http://www.livedemosite.com where is where all the demo’s will be anyway. So, moving on we start with WordPress.

I absolutely love the work that the developers of WordPress and WordPress MU have done and respect the fact that they do more than just toss together code as many open source app developers have done but one thing has always baffled me. The documentation is in disarray and hard to organize in terms of logical structure. So I asked, “Can a person easily wrap their head around the concepts and technology in WordPress?” No, they can’t! At least not without a great deal of background and experience in these types of things as most would tend to agree.

Now years ago I use to love talking above peoples head after being armed with new technical words in my vocabulary, but today I tend to follow a more pleasant practice of speaking in terms a novice can understand. So why isn’t documentation easily understood by those that teach or use it to inform users on how to use their product? I don’t believe anyone at WordPress is incompetent and I know for a fact that they are sticklers for quality as anyone can see, but I think that sometimes professionals have a hard time speaking basic English when it comes to expressing technical jargon. Why? Because the terms we understand articulate the point faster, we understand the technical vocab. Naturally this poses a problem for the new guy, because that person would first have to learn our jargon and then review what is being documented or instructed before understanding what is being read. I’ve concluded that this is a lofty task we ask our students who read our words in the technical terms we and those like us understand. Onward…

WordPress 2.2 Multi User Documentation / Themes

WordPress MU for instance is NOT for rookies and its NOT for the new guy wanting to setup a blog farm on a $6.95 a month hosting plan. Its best implemented by professionals and hosting companies with a firm understanding of LAMP configuration (although I’ve seen WAMP configured WordPress MU before) and networking, specifically DNS and how to deal with sub domains effectively. Now a common environment most attempt to install WordPress MU on is either cPanel or PLESK but both of these present unique challenges. I’ve installed or administered the installation of WordPress MU across many many genera of sites from education to Real Estate and most of these do not have any particular control panel interface. But when dealing with cPanel and or PLESK many find the installation anything but easy.

So now that we have this ideal format I’ll assemble a nice inventory of startup how tos and examples that follow what we call the “reconnect format” to teach in the most effective way. As an educator who teaches Photoshop, I adhere closely to the philosophies outlined in “The Journal of Effective Teaching” and short 3 – 8 minute tutorials accompanied by follow along written documentation is what you can expect.

WordPress 2.2 Real Estate Templates / Themes

I’m already using this very technique in thebrokersedge.com forum as the new design goes into place members with “X” amount of posts will be able to download and use video tutorials free of charge for those things Real Estate related in terms of technology naturally. I exhaustively cover WordPress in part because of my love for the application and its effectiveness for Real Estate professionals to have a site that is more than just a bunch of gallery images with dorky centered text. These existing videos will be adapted in part to teach WordPress usage as well for this venture.

Now I’m not building alternative documentation for any political motive and its not really designed to replace whats already out there but rather to provide a more structured format in easy to follow and navigate format. What WordPress and WordPress MU do for guys like us is just fine. For the new person, well, lets just say you need to NOT be a new person to follow along.

Check out the demo’s over on http://www.livedemosite.com later in the month.

Judging a Book By Its Cover

Posted on June 11, 2007
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Ultimate IDX Facelift 75% increase in responses

The early bird version of the UltimateIDX was something only a mother could love visually and after a redesign and re indexing of one particular site in particular response time from visit to contact has fallen to just 3 minutes on average.

Now what this means is that when a visitor hits the site, the time it takes them to want to take action is under three minutes of doing a search. This client in particular wanted to take his rather basic search interface and spruce it up to be simple, clean, not over designed and to the point and see if that will encourage user interaction. Now I’m always about making the site look as commercial as possible or I wouldn’t be in design. I believe that as much visual expression and detail as possible is essential unless budget prohibits this. Beauty does influence, but facts are facts, and there are many sites out there that are drop dead simple and they out perform high end sites hands down. Why? Well its beyond the focus of this post but I’ll address it I guarantee in a later post.

So by simply cleaning up the design and adding some cleaner navigation a 75% increase in responses is nothing to ignore. The previous design is as follows; http://www.jaredritchey.com/clients/dreamhomessandiego_2.jpg
With the final concept being http://www.jaredritchey.com/clients/dreamhomessandiego_final.jpg

You decide

Real Estate Listing Editor / WordPress 2.2

Posted on June 11, 2007
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Oh Real Estate Plugin where art thou?

Mark has been up to his neck with finals at the college he teaches at and this has taken serious chunks out of his time as college lets out for the year TODAY! Now he can get back to finishing this plugin so I can make it available FREELY naturally.

I’ll keep anyone posted that has sent an email requesting such. Sorry this blog stinks and doesn’t feature the kinds of things I’ve wanted it to have but the new design is at least twice as good and likely 10 times more user friendly.

Fast Web Design Resources

Posted on June 11, 2007
Filed Under Products | 2 Comments

Rapid osCommerce, CRELoaded, osCMax Templates

Got the letter back from the publishing company and I’m excited to say that final edits for the Rapid Template Design Series are underway and will be on bookshelves by late September of this year. College versions will be spiral bound and bookstore versions will be sold in a software box type collection with videos on two DVD’s and support files on a seperate CD.

I only need permission from about a half dozen people on the web to distribute some of their items in the resource tool and once we have that it goes to production.

I originally wrote about it here http://www.jaredritchey.com/rapid-template-design-series.html

As promised I’ll be publishing a short collection of master layout tools and guides for oscommerce and oscmax but the price will be $39.95 not $10 since I realized some additional tools will need to be added to make the tool effective for new people seeking to design their own custom shopping cart sites.

WordPress Out-Ranks Joomla in SEs?

Posted on June 8, 2007
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Real Estate Professionals Note WordPress Ranks Higher, Faster than Joomla

At first I didn’t think so but after careful examination of many sites that I’ve built for Realtors I’ve noticed that those with blogs on the front page tend to rank higher and faster than those that have blogs as either internal such as /blog or as a sub domain. Now my findings could be entirely wrong and I’m in no way suggesting this is 100% fact but I will state that its 100% true in all cases I’ve examined and even in my two new sites its true.

Three months ago I decided to conduct a test to verify my suspicion. I build a site with a WordPress blog in front and a Joomla site in a sub folder and inside of 4 weeks the first set of blog posts had already shown up in Googles search. I made absolutely sure that the subjects were key word terms NO ONE would search for as to filter out competing results. Anyone can rank #1 especially if you have terms no-one searches for and that was my objective in this case. So before you say “IDIOT! Why on earth would you try and rank for a term No-ONE uses”? I only wanted to index that single term to see if it would rank faster than the similar term in Joomla did and sure enough I verified my suspicion.

Ok so what does this mean. Well for me next to nothing because I build all my Realtor clients sites with matching integrated designs anyway. I often put the Joomla menu in both WordPress and OpenRealty so consistency is controlled from one location, so for me, putting WordPress up front is perfectly ok. The fact that the WordPress Loop (WordPress Loop) which is pretty much standard can be customized in such a way as to make WordPress behave more like a CMS than many give credit. Its gives me flexibility in what I’m seeking and naturally since we are publishing a Free WordPress Real Estate Listings Plugin its beneficial to put WordPress at the front door.

I’d love to tell you all about this but, I’m still getting feedback from others I’ve told this to a few months ago and now that are test results are coming in I’ll make a detailed post over on TheBrokersEdge before I post anywhere else. So which is better or should I say which is the better way to go?

WordPress Blog vs Joomla Blog

My own site will be changing too. Even though I had planned for some time to change my design and put my blog in a sub folder and Joomla up front I’ve since changed my mind and the new design will simply accommodate a new philosophy and approach. After purchasing commercial licenses to SEF Advanced and a few other tools I now realize I can do some unique stuff in a way I had rarely considered before. You’ll love it!

Now Joomla has a blog or should I say its default posts are technically a blog type layout which you can stack posts one after the other on the front page. Case in point that articulates this more so than not is the APPROVED and AUTHORIZED clone I got hired to do for a gaming site. The gaming site to be cloned was in all English and the target was all Spanish (which I speak very little of) and the choice for them was Mambo. This gaming site uses a blog method in Mambo to display its posts and ranks quite well for its particular genera.

But which is the better method, WordPress or Joomla up front?
Well for me its WordPress as the front end and Joomla simply in a sub-folder /articles and I’ll be doing all my sites this way that I personally own. I’ll simply write posts in my blog and then provide a link to full detail graphically rich articles in my Joomla install. Joomla gives the option of doing unique things specific to many business types that desire to have a CMS for content management but WordPress, to me, gives the kind of freshness and comfort my target audience is interested in. Facts are facts, people really admire WordPress blogs and routinely visit them, link to them and quote from them in my experience more so than other types of sites.

To look at the APPROVED CLONE I mentioned above you can visit these screen shots below. Keep in mind I DO NOT CLONE other peoples work without permission EVER! Enjoy!
Site design to be cloned.
Target site with Mambo Template

Free osCommerce Templates

Posted on June 8, 2007
Filed Under Products | 4 Comments

osCommerce, CRELoaded, osCMax Templates

Okay so I get asked with greater frequency in the forums about free templates for osCommerce and quite frankly there isn’t any per se. I’m like most template designers and we tend to hack the code quite a bit to get osCommerce to behave the way we want and although I do have a solid foundation of all CSS layouts I’m reluctant to dispose of them at NO cost. So I propose to my php coder, Mark, that we draft a small how to build templates for oscommerce type of ebook and include a few free templates that way. I figure $10 is nearly no money but enough motive to take the time to produce a high enough quality video tutorial to justify doing so.

How to build beautiful oscommerce templates

I’m not sure I like the title yet but for now that is the name of the small guide. As stated above, I’m going to post it up as a $10 download item and include a few video tutorials on the overview and a few code snippets that are essential to understand and then a few templates.

Now keep in mind. I’ve been sending people to www.oscmax.com and www.creloaded.com at a regular and steady rate because the template systems in those applications (one BTS the other STS) are much easier to change on the fly than hard coded oscommerce. That and the fact that both of these loaded versions of oscommerce are already pre-modded with the things nearly ALL people ask for and the admin panel on each is so much more cleaner to work with.

Its my suggestion that if you are a NEW STORE OWNER then you strongly consider CRELoaded or osCMax because these are actively and professionally maintained almost daily. The only real drawback of each is that they are HEAVILY BRANDED. osCMax alone had its web hosting options so present throughout the application that I considered it a plague and removed all of it in the build I install for clients. If you consider a similar option then leave Mikes copyright details on his loaded version but removal of all the free ads is something you may want to do if you plan on installing for a customer that is already hosted.

This is my second weekend attempt at getting my redesign done so I’ll keep you posted on the changes.

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