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 | 3 Comments

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.

CRE Loaded Template Design Dreamweaver Extension

Posted on August 20, 2007
Filed Under Portfolio, Products | 4 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.

Page Turn vs Page Peel Flash Effects

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

If you have ever wanted to have a nice high quality page turn effect for your site then look no further. In recent months I’ve invested heavily into the completion of our Page Turn effect which essentially emulates the effects of a turning page.

The difference between a Flash PageTurn (page turn effect) and a Flash PagePeel (page peel effect) is really not a great deal. The underlying code for nearly all page turn and or page peel type snippets stem from a single source. A woman in China named URNAMI was likely the first to publish the solution in the actionscript forums about 4 years ago. Its the source I’ve used and its the source most others use in their projects. Page Flip or Page Turn is the emulation of actual pages as the final rendering looks more like a booklet or magazine for instance. PagePeel or Flash Page Peeling is an effect that emulates the peeling back of the web page to reveal an advertisement or link as you can see in the upper right corner of my site.

Commercial client projects helped fund the development as I have used it successfully on two domains to date and I’m finalizing its introduction into a Real Estate site for online housing and condo guides. Its a truly nice effect given the limited resources for the project.

Two years ago I had actually planned to release a version that would pull its page data into a set of flash files via XML / PHP for use in Open Realty. The idea was briefly abandoned as version changes to Open Realty opened up a few barriers that proved to be a coding challenge. My initial concern at the time was the lofty amount of code that was currently weighing down the addon to make it void of any real practical use.

Well the worm has turned and I’ll be converting this page turn effect to work with database driven applications like Open Realty. I’m not saying database controlled image management or something as trivial as that, I’m saying pulling of listing data and all listing details to be displayed in a turn page document.

The Female Modeling Magazine Site, The CRE Loaded Cart and soon the Real Estate site will be pretty clean examples of how effective this tool can be used. Commercial sites like JC Penny, Victoria’s Secret and IBM have been using such effects on their web sites for two years. People tend to gravitate to the familiar and books and magazines are familiar. This would explain the attraction to its use I’m sure.

I’ll get a demo up this week for you to examine. Chances are most people would want to see the models so I’ll likely publish that one. I’ll then provide a link to the Real Estate site that has the feature effectively employed.

Flash Page Turn Corner Effect

Posted on August 19, 2007
Filed Under Design, Portfolio, Products, Real Estate News | 11 Comments

Flash Page Peel / Page Flip Effect Script:

Our advertising script is the most effective type of page peel or page flip flash effect on the market. Modified to work with a select few open source applications, the page peel advertising rotator is effective in bringing to life advertising options on your domain.

Dont settle for out dated and greatly annoying popup ads and why settle for banner advertising on your site taking up precious real estate that could be used for more productive site features when you can randomize multiple client advertising campaigns with a system that puts the rest to shame.

80% of your ads success depends on one thing.

Its been said by advertising experts that the 80 / 20 rule applies to advertising in a clearly difinitive way that articulates the effectiveness of an advertisement. For each dollar spent, 80% of that dollar is in the headline and 20% in the content body of an ad. Headlines serve one purpose, to draw attention. That being said; can you honestly think of a more effective headline than this Page Peel Flash Effect Script? The answer should be obvious.

Affordable isn’t even the best way to articulate this. How about Dirt cheap pound for pound more effective than solutions costing hundreds of dollars. If $80.00 out of every $100.00 is spent trying to CATCH YOUR PROSPECTS ATTENTION RIGHT NOW with effective CALLS TO ACTION then this tool is as cost effective any can be. My 80% would be to bet on a sure thing rather than throwing darts at a dart board in hopes someone would click my banner.

CRE Loaded Catalog Images

Posted on August 7, 2007
Filed Under Design, Portfolio, Products, Real Estate News, Template Design Kit | 1 Comment

CRE Loaded Thumbnail Generator

Nothing is more annoying than seeing or hearing about the frustration end users and site owners have with their site after spending a lofty chunk on its development. Although some things are certain to surface almost routinely, many things can be avoided by taking the time to draft well written and clear documentation.

In CRE Loaded projects I almost always provide site owners with a style guide if I have the slightest idea that he / she intend on using the content page features in the cart. Now, all though CRE Loaded comes with a WYSIWYG editor for product listings, it does not come with a logical explanation on how to use it effectively and therein lies the problem I face quite frequently with end users.

CRE Loaded unlike osCommerce provides a way for store owners to add content in a more rich and controlled format, thats the good part. But Its been my long held suggestion to end users to do their publishing of content offline in a professional html editor (commercial or not) primarily because online editors fill your drafts with countless inline elements that can break a layout. In every single one of my commercial sites, I draft the content in MS Word so I can port a version of my article to a PDF and MS Reader for downloads and then I copy that article into Dreamweaver, clean up the messy MS Word markup, validating the structure, then pasting it into the WYSIWYG editor in HTML format. As you can guess my blog is NOT one of those places I do this at. Nothing here validates. (proof positive on another experiment I’ll tell you about later)

Pictures and Content Break My Layout!

So, in CRE Loaded projects and templates I’ve always provided the client with a simple one page sheet on the correct image sizes and a small collection of examples among other things for the editor. In the last month alone I’ve seen only 1 person use a CRE Loaded design I’ve built correctly. Thumbnail images are consistent in size, the popup images are all the same size and product images are all the same size. Its when people try to upload these gigantic images in hopes that they will be sized correctly that problems begin.

Because of this I’ve had the php guy build me three little CRE Loaded generators that I’m publishing free of charge for your use. The main one is a simple image generator that takes the product photo and produces three output sizes based on user variables for either width or height. It will add a nice little user defined prefix to the image and provide some other features that will help CRE store owners to quickly generate consistent photo sizes without the lengthy process of producing them in photoshop.

I’ll write more on this generator and the content validation generators later in the week. Until then, blog like a mad man.

CSS Menus Design Generator

Posted on June 13, 2007
Filed Under Products | Leave a Comment

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.

Real Estate Listing Editor / WordPress 2.2

Posted on June 11, 2007
Filed Under Products | Leave a Comment

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.

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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