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

Open-Realty 2.4.1 Templates

Posted on June 11, 2007
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Open Realty 2.4.1 Released

Transparent Technologies, developers of Open Realty did a security release of this popular real estate listings script. This release is a suggested update release as it addresses security fixes discovered in the previous version 2.4.

2.4.1 also features a patched search.inc.php file which should make the creation of more customized search functionality a bit easier. A contribution by Al Smith from www.heretohost.com is a regular supporter and contributor to Open Realty in terms of addons and coding. No changes to template structure was noted so upgrading should be a painless effort for those who possess custom interfaces.

Open Realty Site Rankings JUMP overnight from position 88 to 11

One specific addon that should be included in any Open-Realty site bent on ranking is the addon developed by Al Smith called “SiteMap for Open-Realty”. This addon is absolutely one of the most effective addons I’ve witnessed in action that actually benefits the site owner extensively. Many addons available for Open Realty tend to me more trivial in terms of real world feature enhancers and should be avoided unless you absolutely need them. Toys are nice but customers rarely care them when it comes to actually looking for a home.

The SiteMap tool however took one particular site recently from #88 in the goolge search to position #11 in under a week after the site owner published the XML file using google’s web developer tools. The site had 4,000+ MLS listings put in using the vieleRETS tool and once the sitemap was generated it took the Realtor just days to realize how effective it was. Yesterday, the Realtor advised me that he receives on average, 1,200 contacts a week via his Open Realty / WordPress site of which he can attribute more than 80% as a direct result of his listings being indexed by google more effectively. This coupled with his print advertising in local Real Estate rag sheets and radio advertising, has given me for the first time in the past two years a full time look at how effective Open-Realty is in handling traffic. This sitemap tool from Al Smith was able to get th domain from a PR1 to PR2 overnight and the relevance in content is increased by the way we employed the property listings details page. No secrets revealed here, I’ll keep you posted at a later date but the traffic has been steady at 350 hits an hour on average.

So whats the reason? Ideal market? Good marketing? Genius Web Designer? I say designer but I’m biased having built the site, but the jury is out on the entire reason as to why the increase was exponential and as it stands I’m saying sitemap and good google rank. I can back this up too and I’ll post charts as we monitor the traffic for those interested in seeing how Open Realty performs.

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
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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
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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.

osCommerce Tabbed Navigation

Posted on June 8, 2007
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Sliding Doors of CSS using Tabs for Navigation

After getting a little third party help recently on some PHP code to make the tabs a bit more dynamic for for osCommerce I’m pretty happy with the results the contribution. This contribution essentially takes the sliding doors all css tabs example from AListApart and gives the user a way to control the active tag in a dynamic environment.

The only hangup at this time is that you have to do a redirect to get the yourdomain.com/ to appear as yourdomain.com/index.php in order for the solution to work. I’ll be working on fixing it so that is not required.

Read more on the tabs effect from here http://alistapart.com/articles/slidingdoors/

CRELoaded - osCommerce - WordPress Templates

Posted on June 7, 2007
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Integrated design and templates - WordPress eCommerce

Its interesting! In the past 4 months after people reading my posts around the web about making osCommerce and WordPress sing together how persistent the questions keep on rolling in.

I put together a little tutorial over on www.livedemosite.com in the articles section of Joomla which I’ll make live and it covers some of the key steps you need to consider and keep in mind in order to pull it off.

I’m 95% designer and 5% everything else (sort of) so much of what I’ve done has everything to do with the look and feel of the integration. This poses problems for those that want custom coding because up until this point almost no one ever asks for it when it comes to sharing the user database and such. Well that is about to change.

I hired a programmer to complete a bridge so I can bring together WordPress and either osCommerce, osCMax, or CRELoaded users together. It will basically be a simple login replacement form for either of the loaded variants of osCommerce replacing the existing one. The logic is simple and I’ll disclose more on that later.

I’ll keep you posted in more detailed rant later.

Free Open Realty Templates

Posted on June 7, 2007
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Real Estate Professionals and Open-Realty

Ok so I got a little flack recently for making templates available only on my demo sites or over at the cssdesignmagic.com site which has been updated recently and I figured I’d drop in a plug without revealing to much.

You see, I get asked for templates no less than 5 times a day related to the real estate industry and the funny thing is I still can’t figure out how exactly people are downloading my designs from ASiteAbove.com and this site. I’ve NEVER published a URL on this site to ANY of my designs EVER and I don’t plan to until I’m completely finished with my redesign of this blog template and the new one is applied at TheBrokersEdge.com (a toss together design, not real beautiful in my opinion)

So this is a heads up. I’m giving several away while still providing some commercial solutions for good ole Open Realty in the hopes that professionals will still consider Open Realty as a pretty good tool for entry level to mid sized agencies and or offices. Its beautiful for the individual agent as well.

So if you’re a real estate pro and want a template then please email me. I’ve made it no secret that I’ll share these designs freely but I’m not posting them up publicly until my new interface is finished.

Joomla Real Estate Templates

Posted on June 7, 2007
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Use with OpenRealty or HotProperty

Just tested three new real estate template designs for the ole inventory and the moment I hear back on my post in Joomla in reference to the status of version 1.5 I’ll post them for download.

The idea behind these designs was to put in some features that would be key to marketing real estate sites and services such as MLS search, FSBO and or rental listings type sites. These sites are EXTREMELY difficult to market and profit from and of all the clients I’ve seen succeed at this, they ALL have a common characteristic.

Long ago when I regularly built FSBO and Rental Listings sites the market was fresh and open. Not so many fly-by-night make me rich please type ventures, now that the popularity of these have seriously plummeted I’ve been moving people to WordPress as individual apartment and rental property owners discover its a better tool.

So these designs were largely prompted as a result of this noticeably cookie cutter designs that plague the internet. Granted there are still plenty of uses for FSBO type sites but the cash register days are long since over for the turn key quick buck artists.

Professional Service Sites: Yes and In order to get these service sites profitable as many of my clients have done a key component is a site with unique portal features and some I’m not going to elaborate on yet. I will say however that some things I notice after 3+ years of designing FSBO type sites that the only ones that stay successful are those that follow a different set of rules than say for instance the dating site business. Treating an FSBO or rental listing site as a dating site simply wont work. Its a common mistake and although many do get loaded up with a few hundred listings the key players that go beyond that (non national) do so in part for those reasons mentioned above and a good site concept.

When the templates are released you can read more blog posts on the subject of getting your site launched successfully if you are in the service industry.

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