Open Realty Featured Listings - Anywhere

Posted on November 16, 2007
Filed Under Portfolio, Real Estate News | Leave a Comment

How to put Open Realty® Featured Listings Anywhere!

Previously we had released a small code snippet that worked independently of Open Realty® that provided site designers to place featured listings rotators on external sites or even external pages outside of the application. Given the rework of some of my other code snippets I found that this one has proved very valuable to the 70+ people who purchased the basic version and decided on an update.

The new version is in part motivated with the anticipation of Open Realty® 2.5 and features many features above and beyond our basic $5 version. Here is a short list of what currently works in this next release.

Display Featured Listings by Agent
Display Featured Listings by Listing Office
Display Featured Listings by State or City
Display Featured Listings by Neighborhood
Display Featured Listings by Listing Office
Integrates well with our Multi Site feature
Templates can be placed in one of three optional animated features (more on the way)
Click Stat Tracking
Display Featured Listings with document attachments
Display Featured Listings throughout your site each with independent and different templates

MORE FEATURES TO BE ANNOUNCED……

To purchase the snippets please visit the Featured Listings Anywhere Product Page

Word Press - Open Realty Integration

Posted on October 26, 2007
Filed Under Design, Portfolio, Products, Real Estate News | 4 Comments

Open Realty and WordPress Integrated Script

Realtors know that a blog can make or break a website and more often than not blogs are being used to break the plateau and barrier with greater ease as a result of blogs.

Realtors would love to have a blog that also featured listings from their featured listings section of their site, many of which use Open Realty. Well now thats possible with the use of some of our proprietary methods for integration that gives Realtors true power in having featured listings displayed within tier blogs via a truly integrated method in design and function.

WordPress to Open Realty - Open Realty to WordPress - Starting at $49.95

The RTDS (Rapid Template Design Series) has been my personal pet project for more than two years and after hearing all the rhetoric, the back talk and other na sayer attitudes I’m happy to say that this very lofty project of mine is nearing its long overdue completion. I’m a Photoshop instructor almost full time during the week now and one of the most rewarding aspects of the RTDS is the speed in which fundamental elements of design can be applied.

Because of the near completion of the RTDS I’m eager to test some of the fundamental characteristics in a production level environment like never before by doing custom conversions for WordPress and Open Realty templates at turnkey prices.

WordPress Real Estate Listings Manager - Open Realty

8 months ago I hired tasked my PHP Coder to complete the WordPress Real Estate Listing Manager to be a free WordPress plugin for Realtors. Happily, and after completion I released exactly 17 copies for beta testing, which puzzling as it was, I NEVER heard a single peep back regarding the functionality and features. Still installed on my LiveDemoSite.com site, I feared the worse for the plugins success combined with a busy work schedule I put the plugin on the back burner. However as things change and schedules get shuffled so to does my priorities and after completing literally dozens and dozens of site design integrations with Open Realty, Joomla and WordPress its time to divvy up an alternative solution. The RTDS gave me motive to provide a way for Realtor and Real Estate blog owners to have featured listings and listing details displayed effectively with their blogs.

Although the WordPress Real Estate plugin isn’t dead in my project inventory, it does need some serious rethinking to figure why I received no feedback from beta testers. Maybe they were just curiosity seekers or even competitors! ? But, the project will be re-examined in the coming weeks for repositioning. Not intended to replace the Open Realty WordPress method I’m so fond of, the plugin was really designed for an individual that may feature their own listings.

So on we go, Real Estate WordPress options exist in the form of a clever set of code snippets and integration methods I’ve used on dozens and dozens of sites with great success. If the objective is to have a blog while maintaining an assortment of featured listings to be displayed then send me an email for a fast quote. As I said, this service will start out at $49.95 which is a drop in the bucket when considering alternative options.

Template Monster Open Realty Conversion

Posted on October 26, 2007
Filed Under Design, Portfolio, Real Estate News | 1 Comment

Template Monster - Boxed Art - Joomla - to Open Realty Conversion

Looking through my client archives today I discovered that I’ve converted no fewer than 50+ template from an assortment of template clubs for various clients to work with Open Realty.

Open Realty like many CMS type applications uses a template engine that generates the rendering of the final site based on predefined template tags to display content dynamically. Because of this the process can be confusing to some people on how exactly they should or could convert a design they admire to function with Open Realty.

Conversion of Templates to Open Realty starting at $39.95

After completing the Open Realty Adobe Dreamweaver Extension, it had been my initial plan to not only release the Adobe Dreamweaver Extension as a free tool but to use it to convert existing designs submitted to me by clients rapidly to work with Open Realty keeping prices competitive and affordable.

Now you can have a template converted to function with Open Realty 2.4.3+ starting under $40 bucks. Designs and layout options may vary extensively so quoting on an individual basis will still be par for the course. General conversions usually take a few hours on the outside depending on how closely a design is to be adhered to and could exceed the day rate for some more complex designs.

Photoshop and Tables to CSS XHTML compliant conversions - Starts at $49.95

Expanding on this as a service now that the final stages of the Rapid Template Design Series nears its 5th beta assembly, I’ve decided to extend a short run service of converting photoshop and non compliant design concepts to fully validating and functioning CSS XHTML compliant designs.

The general process is to have a client submit a design (Photoshop or otherwise) to be converted and coded CSS XHTML compliant. Naturally since this type of service is in relative high demand the minimum price for commercial concerns (template clubs, resellers, turnkeys and so on) will be $100+

Should you need either Tables to CSS XHTML conversion or entire ground up coding of your concepts please do not hesitate to request a quote. For conversion of Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, Template Monster or other types of templates to Open Realty, submit your request with either a link to the design or as a ZIP attachment for a rapid and accurate estimate.

$40 - $100 is a trivial expense when compared to other options for these types of conversion. Using the Rapid Template Design Series gives me the chance to stretch the legs of the process and run it through its paces yet again. Doing so gives you a super good cost effective and affordable option for getting compliant and functional designs fast. As a commercial reseller of templates and or XHTML templates for template clubs this price is certainly going to change in the future so getting on the project schedule is most important.

Page Turn - Page Peel - Adobe Flash Effects

Posted on October 22, 2007
Filed Under Design, Portfolio | Leave a Comment

Variable Flash Elements Positions

A short blurb about the positioning elements like the Adobe Page Turn and Adobe Page Flip items on your site will save you a bit of headache others have experienced.

I published some time ago how to add variable code to control when a particular items shows up on a site based on its URL and this technique can be applied to the display of elements like the Adobe Flash Page Peel and Adobe Flash Page Flipping Book Effects. With the Page Flip or Flash Book as its sometimes called. I’ve applied variable code using PHP to display the book only one time per visit which used session cookies to work properly. With the variable code post I made, its easy to apply a feature in dynamic sites where an element like a flash item displays only on a particular page. Albeit easy in CMS Applications like Joomla, products like Open Realty and or WordPress (depending on the template) can be a bit difficult. You can read the post here.

FREE OsCommerce Templates

Posted on October 22, 2007
Filed Under Portfolio, Products | Leave a Comment

Free standard osCommerce Templates easy to modify

Cleaning out my old project directory I discovered that I did in fact have about a half dozen good quality foundation templates for osCommerce MS2 and what I’ve done is install the latest MS2 version over on the LiveDemoSite.com to test them and I’m going to release them FREE.

These templates are NOT super beautiful, a bit heavy, and quite honestly won’t work if you have modified your osCommerce Core. This is one of the biggest reasons I admire the STS and BTS template features in some versions of osCommerce like oscMax, CRE Loaded and so on. Modification to templates in osCommerce requires so much time and energy that it frustrates nearly every designer I’ve ever worked with or been hired to product templates for. People usually if not always modify or extend the capabilities of their osCommerce sites with contributions that modify individual files many of which are template related. This poses a problem.

So, since I rarely suggest osCommerce templates to existing sites anymore I’m going to publish these as FREE providing you register and select “I Agree” that you understand that these are not intended to be added to existing live production sites as they will most certainly break any site with contributions having been added. These templates are for brand spanking new sites using osCommerce MS2+ and beyond that I can promise nothing.

osCommerce vs osCMax vs CRE Loaded vs Shopping Carts - FREE!

I’m a big fan of osCommerce and suggest it to people almost weekly but my latest passion has been in the area of integration as more and more people are realizing the absolute necessary requirement of SEF and SEO friendly commerce solutions. I absolutely love the iJoomla cart although some things about its functionality with OpenSEF is a bit of a mystery it along with CRE Loaded are likely my two favorites to date. A close second is the cart I use on this very site with WordPress along with XCart and of course osCMax. I’ve never been a big fan of ZenCart only because they seek to achieve way to much in the application.

CRE Loaded Templates vs osCommerce Templates

For speed and ease of templating I always suggest people spend the $10 and get a copy of CRE Loaded. The ease in which a template can be applied makes it worth the investment. Options like those for integration I tend to favor are certainly top on my list, but of the osCommerce flavors available, CRE Loaded and osCMax are by far the easiest to create and maintain various template features for. Integration is achievable as in osCommerce but require a bit more work.

osCommerce templates require substantial modifications to individual files to change the look and or feel of a site on a per page basis. Using some PHP in a BTS template for instance makes this relatively simple providing the site owner also invests in the CRE SEF plugin because some template changes are based on the URL.

All CRE Loaded and osCommerce Templates look alike - Beautiful Designs Not Possible?

Have you ever wondered why these templates all look and behave the same? Take any 50 osCommerce, CRE Loaded and Zen Cart templates, stack them on top of one another, and transparently look through them all. You will discover they are all essentially the same. Same features, same general structure, same general look and certainly the same bulky fat and heavy code. I’ve yet to see one of these actually available in XHTML and CSS compliant formats. The silly thing is that XHTML and CSS compliant is actually possible with some core modifications that neither CRE Loaded or others seem at all interested in. Why then are they so expensive?

The number one motive for me not releasing commercial grade CRE Loaded designs has been as I’ve elated to so many times in forums across the web. Simply “proprietary code” which sets all my commercial designs for clients above and beyond standard turnkey designs. I’ve been very tempted to make available commercial grade CRE Loaded templates with the kinds of features professional online stores deserve but have been unable to really package in a meaningful way a turnkey template solution that would be easy to install for novice users. The simple fact is that most of my CRE Loaded templates require some degree of time consuming modification to work per domain and has kept me from a turnkey release option.

Luckily times change, and I’ve been able to have some new code written that should make configuration relatively easy. I’m not going to promise anything, but will simply say keep your eyes on this blog in the next few weeks as I’m cleaning up and repackaging my CRE Loaded inventory for distribution. What you can expect is anything but carbon copy designs for the hundreds of dollars you normally expect.

FREE Open Realty 2.4.3 Templates

Posted on October 22, 2007
Filed Under Portfolio, Products, Real Estate News | 9 Comments

15 FREE entry level CSS - XHTML templates for Open Realty 2.4.3

I promised over the weekend to wrap up the collection of designs that I had planned to give away on this site and I’ve done just that. IT took me a spank of time to get things to validate after looking again and again at what consistently failed validation had to do with Open Realty’s core but I managed to trick the validators into calling these compliant.

I’ve got some documentation to do to the templates and I’d like to add a snippet or two to make them a bit more interactive and I’ll publish them in my new Joomla install. PLEASE IGNORE my Joomla template as its a bit goofy. I had it in inventory and can’t quite remember where I even got it from but its not my design. Just something I tossed up as I wanted to configure my install.

You WILL be required to register to the site in order to download and I do require email verification. If you feel this is nonsense I’m pretty understanding and you can just toss me an email and I’ll grant you access to the templates. I like to have people register because I’m taking a great deal more time in completing projects for my site than ever before and I’d like to notify people of updates not to mention when people register to my site it boosts my ego by 10 fold. Ego is important.

Thanks for visiting….

Moving to Missouri - The Brokers Edge

Posted on September 4, 2007
Filed Under Design, Portfolio, Products, Real Estate News | 3 Comments

Joomla / OpenRealty / WordPress Websites are all ranking high

I’m excited about some of my the discoveries I have so passionately invested energies into. Its one thing for a person to draw conclusion and theories about search engine optimization having little or no experience as I so often see today being played out in forums on the subject. But its an entirely different thing to test, harbor, covet and experiment with techniques first hand that lends so much to a collection of winning formulas giving someone the ability to say that what they do isn’t just half wit theory, but something that actually works.

For nearly a year now I’ve planned on moving to Missouri where the offices of The Brokers Edge are located and have held off mainly because the UltimateIDX was in its third beta nearly ready for production release. Well with a renewed teaching contract and the UltimateIDX in production status, a brick and mortar office with a desk with my name on it calls to me.

Being an instructor, writer and freelance designer, my office gets to follow me around most the time as I pack my laptop to and from the college as well as meetings related to what I do. Teaching Photoshop or writing course ware is a fond passion as is design in general but The Brokers Edge presents an opportunity for me to do all three and never skip a beat. But this really fits in when I considered much of the information myself and Mark has been tabulating so it makes logical sense.

Today after confirming that better than 80% of my serious clients (those that take the internet serious) all rank in the top 10 for their search terms, I built a portfolio I had in standby ready to present these gems. Sometimes I wonder if It’s by luck or the grace of god that I’ve never had two clients in the same market for the same industry. I am just not sure how I would represent two competing sites with search engine optimization effectively. Thankfully The Brokers Edge has a formula that apparently works doing just that. Looking down my list I found that client websites I’ve built and or migrated from Advanced Access or Agent Image for example now rank #1 - #10 consistently and the tools we used were Joomla, OpenRealty, and WordPress. Granted severe hacks to OpenRealty were required to achieve this but they none the less work.

So why do I say “serious clients” other than the obvious? In the time I’ve been doing this business it still surprises me that a person would either not take the internet serious for Real Estate or when they do, they simply pay so much money to have me develop a site only to sit on it and let it do nothing but age. Aging a site is a good thing, sitting on it untouched is a bad thing. Serious Realtors, those that know, understand that according to the national averages, nearly ALL (80% - 90%) home purchases begin with searches online. Why then let a site sit stagnant?

Last Thursday I got a phone call from such a client that owns a site in Utah that I developed with the triplicate solution (Joomla - WordPress - OpenRealty) more than 18 months ago. Today I still see that the site has never received a PR and never indexed for a single term because the 9 agent blogs I built were simply NEVER used and the content is as old, cut-n-paste stagnant as can be. Tragic really because the energy that went into the site to provide the Turn Page Flash Real Estate Gallery, Real Estate Document Management, Online RTF document generator (custom mind you), an Integrated Innova Studio WYSIWYG editor with a half dozen content layout templates that should have made publishing a snap. Features is what the site was all about yet inactivity again demonstrates what we have long known. More on that later.

So, moving, I think that The Brokers Edge will give a nice central place to display the technologies in real world demos that articulate the finer points of good seo readied sites. Guided navigation, Title Tags, URL’s, relevant content, and the list goes on. When a Realtor considers that the cost of developing a triplicate solution like I so frequently write about using all these tools for well below a $1,000; it makes it a real hard argument to justify proprietary solutions that so many often jump right into. Had it not been for the up sell on established length and name recognition, more people, not just Realtors, would jump on this because it works and it GIVES YOU CONTROL. Besides, when you couple this with The UltimateIDX which was designed and developed to work with ANY real estate site on a LAMP server and provide CRM (client resource management) features along with Multiple Listing Service data directly into the Realtors site, this IS a total solution. It WORKS with Joomla - Open Realty - Word Press and nearly a dozen other open source CMS solutions and sites. I’ll keep you posted.

CRE Thumbnail Generator

Posted on August 20, 2007
Filed Under Design, Portfolio, Products, Real Estate News | 1 Comment

Frustrating to see templates I design break because end users upload an image that just blows the sides out of a design. With all CRE Loaded templates I deliver I always include the user guide on standards and formats to administer the site with efficiency. The problem with the CRE Loaded feature for managing image sizes is that it can distort the clarity and quality of your image while doing NOTHING to optimize the images.

One thing that always frustrates end users and store owners is the inconsistent sizes of image that they use in CRE Loaded makes their store look cheap and un professional. CRE Loaded does have an automatic sizing feature but most store owners that maintain commercial sites do editing of images offline. Why, because people gravitate and expect patterns they can gain comfort in. Nothing says crappy site more than one with many things in disarray that it confuses users.

So why not just have an image thumbnail generator that simply takes your image file, and generates the three sizes necessary for product listings? Well this generator does just that; the user can define the width or height variables, the prefix for the file, ie “small_”, “medium_” “large_” and maintain consistency in image sizes for all product listings.

The nice thing about using this method for custom prefixes is that when a person has a product image for say, a Dell Laptop Computer — dell_laptop.jpg the prefixes will generate sized images that are easily identified for size format. The images become small_dell_laptop.jpg, medium_dell_laptop.jpg, large_dell_laptop.jpg or any prefix user defined of course. I mean you could easily make your prefix im_a_tumble_weed_ resulting in an image with the name im_a_tumble_weed_dell_laptop.jpg

This script is NOT a contribution that goes into CRE Loaded primarily because I wanted to keep it external for use with ZendCart, osCommerce and other applications that require such things. Specifically for store and cart systems that do not have sizing options like CRE Loaded does.

FREE for use on my site and a mere $5 to have the feature on yours creates a valuable time saver.

WordPress Real Estate Listing Manager

Posted on August 20, 2007
Filed Under Portfolio, Products, Real Estate News | 9 Comments

Remember this one. My programmer had built and we beta tested the WordPress 2.2 Listing Manager for Real Estate sites and Brokerages but never released it. Well today its back on the project block of things to do in September even though our new code makes WordPress work beautifully with listings in a way I’ll reveal later.

I charged my coder to do three things before we call it a “Real Estate” plugin for WordPress. I told him that I wanted the new modifications to feature custom fields and to have it so I can have three versions on my site for FREE download under three different names. Minor changes will naturally justify the three names as I want to approach three types of blog genera with this script.

I’m going to call the three versions; “Real Estate Listing Plugin” , “Automotive Listing Plugin” and “Photo Classifieds Gallery” since this plugin is really only a gallery plugin to begin with. The main difference is the fact that it is a gallery script that the display of gallery items are fully customizable and additional details and elements can be added by the blog owner. Search abilities are naturally a key feature as are PERMALINKS for SEO friendly links.

I hate delays more than anything but sometimes priorities shift and I’m forced to make drastic changes to keep up with obligations. I certainly hope I can get this to you before I grow old.

Until then, happy blogging.

CRE Loaded Template Design Dreamweaver Extension

Posted on August 20, 2007
Filed Under Portfolio, Products | 2 Comments

One of the more ambitious products I design for is also one of the most frustrating for new or inexperienced designers. CRE Loaded is a forked variant of osCommerce that was modified to feature some pre installed contributions and then made commercial.

CRE Loaded shares with its parent a rather standard old school early PHP 3 method of templating for presentation. osCommerce as many will note, has been the most downloaded and widely used shopping cart on the internet second to none. As template options like BTS and STS came available, forked versions started to popup beginning with Zen Cart then others that have come and gone. BTS and STS adds a degree of design control that is easier understood and quicker to implement template changes lending a great deal to the continuing growth of each solution.

Why on earth then would a person need to create a Dreamweaver Extension for CRE Loaded? A few minor but relative routine reasons; template design for CRE Loaded is anything but exciting and most if not all the designs people take notice of are as indifferent as the next. Take any 100 or 200 designs you like, stack them on top of one another and peer down into them and you will see that almost all of the stock inventory available are essentially the same. The same features, the same menus, the same navigation types, the same everything but design elements and graphics.

The Dreamweaver Extension includes a few pre defined features that will hopefully change all that. Of all the designs I get contracted to do for osCommerce or CRE Loaded, most if not all of them request the same old run of the mills look and layout that they could easily go to Template Monster and purchase. 90% of all templates I design for either solution are for template houses and template resellers. In recent months I’ve spent a great deal of $$$ redoing my code base and snippet inventory to make some rather proprietary, detailed and fully unique features for future templates. This extension is the result of that.

If a person truly wants to be able to design a template for CRE Loaded or osCommerce and has only basic entry level skills than this extension is the answer. I had planned to release it free of charge and just charge for the tutorials and support elements but after looking more at my design inventory I realized I could be cutting my own thought. When the extension is released it will feature some additional packaged elements along with a few dozen unique feature sets that will likely sell for $40.

I’ll present more details later on some of the elements of the extension.

keep looking »