Nancy Etcoff – Survival of the Prettiest

Posted on July 11, 2007
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Appearance is Golden!

I keep a handful of only 5 or 6 books I like to re read over time in order to gain new perspectives on subjects related to this industry of web design. One book in particular stood out recently as I begin to dig back in and evaluate the subject of Beauty and its power to motivate and influence. As you may already know or understand, beauty by itself has the power to influence without any assistance what soever.

Worthy of reading time and again, the well thought out exploratory examinations of beauty in Nancy Etcoff’s book “Survival of the Prettiest” reveals many insights applicable to those in web design. Unlike similar books that boast superficial ideologies about beauty, Nancy Etcoff’s book explores the subject from a psychological as well as social aspect fully articulating the history and influence beauty has on people.

Although beauty can be argued as superficial that characterization demeans the defining points almost to the point of cliche. Pickup a copy and examine it for yourself. I think you’ll be impressed with the content and writings.

Joomla Multi Sites Plugin

Posted on July 11, 2007
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Multi Sites Review

Cruising through my list of articles I wanted to write this week, one in particular stood out that I wanted to drop a little blurb about.

A good majority of my clients are Realtors and or Real Estate related customers and time and time again I find the need of a way to manage multiple domains with a single utility. A great tool for this when using Joomla is the Multi Sites Pro plugin.

A few times in the past I’ve had Realtor clients that have wanted to publish many keyword targeted domains for their agency where the need to manage data of similar (NEVER IDENTICAL) content was essential. With the Multi Sites tool, not only can Realtors manage and or share, users across several domains; agencies have the ability to publish menus, resources, directories and quite literally anything within the Joomla environment to any number of domains for an added SEO boost.

I have a lofty article planned on some critical tips for SEO and SEF optimization in Real Estate sites and one of the features I’ll explore will be the use of Multi Sites in real estate related sites.

A designers #1 mistake and how to fix it.

Posted on July 1, 2007
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Website owners assume people care about them.

The first rule in all web design should be that the only person you will ever impress is the person you are designing for and maybe yourself. People do not visit sites because they care about you or your design; they visit your site to find a solution specific to their need and if you fail to provide that, then the rest is moot.

Much like writing a book, the creative and intuitive process can be broken down into steps that when followed will likely produce consistent and predictable results. Writing is said to be many things but more often than not its said to be an expression of thought. True the pen is mightier than the sword, writing has the power to influence to a great degree, the audience of its intent. Therein lies the key fundamental solution on how to fix a web designers #1 Mistake in design. The process of good design is all about being intuitive and you can expect predictable results when the entire process is followed from conception to delivery. But this in no way says that a designer should NOT make a web site attractive visually. Right? Lets keep things in perspective.

Think about this for a moment. Would you take a 30 gallon metal garbage can and put high grade European automotive paint on it? Why or why not? What exactly is wrong with having a nice looking garbage can? Maybe this isn’t the best way to articulate a point but then again if your site is a container for garbage, then no amount of expensive paint is going to change that.

You design for your audience

It is a bold statement to say that visitors to your site care less about you and your design than you would hope they do. But all to often site designers (and I’m guilty of it myself) focus more on the appearance than the content in hopes that the design will impress enough that someone will caress my ego with praise.

But good quality web design is not a one time $100 shot in the dark for an interface. I don’t know how many times I’ve been asked to simply provide attractive interfaces wherein some of the design specifications defy good marketability of the finished product. I’ve written on guided navigation and intuitive layouts in no fewer than a dozen forums and every time I do, the interaction and responses are so great in number that its clear to me its a subject not covered enough.

Good web design begins with…

So how then does a designer solve this self love and presumption that a visitor cares about his / her design? Simple! All of the above provides the introduction and the summary goes like this;

First lets restate the mistake;
Designing for you and your needs, operating under the belief that people care about your design. Big mistake!

Easy Solution!
When approaching good design, keep your audience always in mind and design for them, NOT YOU. Every facet from interface to content and typography is all for someone else and rarely for you. Good web design begins with a clear idea of who your target audience is before all else. It should be the first group of question a designer asks a client just prior to all other interview questions.

If you have to caress your ego, get a blog, it works wonders for mine.

Breakthrough Advertising “The Course”

Posted on July 1, 2007
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Making mad cash with the course that teaches it

Breakthrough Advertising, the money book, written by Eugene Schwartz. When time is of the essence and you need to turn your site into a cash register now, this is the book to have.

Most internet successes that rank do so because of the practice of following the techniques used by highly successful advertising copywriters. Breakthrough Advertising was called the Holy Grail of deep psychological insights that lead to breakthrough marketing campaigns.

The book however is exceptionally rare and considering that it had been listed on ebay just a year ago for $900 says a lot about its extreme value. Don’t believe me? Go try and check it out at your local library. Chances are its in the reference books area and isn’t available for checkout. It would quickly vanish if it were.

Well why go on about this when I can just cut to the chase? Years ago while at the college I witnessed the maintenance people tossing out old college binders into the dumpster and my curiosity (and sense of greed) prompted me to ask why they were tossing such nice three ring binders. Upon closer examination it was clear to see that these were supplemental course materials which sold in the book store from three years prior. The binders were in excellent condition as were most of the contents.

You know what happened. Jared went dumpster diving! I began by tossing as many binders (with course materials included) into the back seat of my car as fast as I could until I could carry no more. It should be obvious what I discovered by now, right? Of all 50+ three ring binders with contents I managed to gather up, 29 turned out to be the materials with a full reprint of Eugene Schwartz’s book Breakthrough Advertising. Apparently part of the marketing course at the college the contents also included an assortment of examples ads, guides on advertising analysis and many dozens of excerpts from seasoned professional copywriters.

Its funny almost. I’m writing about books and course material that I’ve had in boxes in my attic for more than 14 years. I still have the emails in archive that I sent to Michael Senoff asking for an appraisal of the materials. I think I’m going to post 20 of these up for sale after I add to the materials a few additional materials specific to marketing for the web. Price? Lets toss around the idea $250 per copy.

I ask this question. How many of your products do you need to sell to justify spending $250 on a course featuring Breakthrough Advertising which has made more direct marketing millionaires than any other book?

I’m not in the business of publishing and selling books! There is but one exception which is my Rapid Template Design Series, but that too is more of a course than a book per se. Yeah, lets explore this a bit more. EVERY SINGLE WEB SITE OWNER needs good copywriting and every blog would certainly benefit from the techniques that are tried true and tested discussed throughout this course.

I’ll leave it here for now….

Breakthrough Advertising

Posted on July 1, 2007
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How to Write Ads That Shatter Traditions and Sales Records

For almost 12 years now I’ve been lucky to have obtained two copies of one of the most amazing books ever printed on the subject of advertising and marketing. So amazing in fact that two years ago when I considered selling a copy on ebay the going price at that point was about $900 per copy. I quickly realized that maybe it would be a good idea to put one in a safe deposit box “just in case”.

Well, this morning while going through my library of books, I dusted off the cover of my treasure and looked on Amazon.com to see what the current price range was; I was amazed to see that the book still fetches $350 on average with some poor quality and used copies as low as $200.

The book I’m referring to is one called “Breakthrough Advertising” and its written by direct marketing mail order genius Eugene Schwartz. This book has made more mail order millionaires than any other book of its type. Its sold more copies than any TV Get Rich Guru junk and is more coveted by professionals than any classic of its genera. The book, originally published in the 60′s features principles and wisdom that are as fresh and accurate today as they were almost 50 years ago. Why? because fundamentals never die and Eugene Schwartz did an amazing job of taking the wisdom of professionals and actual successes and outlines fundamental so simple that the bold and arrogant, more often than not educated ivy league types generally disregard the wisdom recklessly.

But is the book all hype and moot. When you consider that many books have been written that have been full of hype and just as equally full of crap it begs the question. Take the mega successful book titled “The Secret” for example. Here is a book filled with more garbage and deception than any other self help book of its type. After going through the book I always felt that a punch line was about to show up that said “you believe this crap don’t you, GOTCHA!” Still, it was easy to notice that every single page is filled with content so generalized that if you did succeed by following its useless suggestions, you could easily attribute your success to the books pseudo wisdoms. But then again if you frequently bet 50/50 on anything for your decision making in life then you can really only expect happenstance results that are more coincidence than science. You could bet the same fate on garnering wisdom from a comic book with equal results.

Unlike “The Secret”, Breakthrough Advertising isn’t just another book packed with generalizations and unfounded science and theories. Although any book can be made suspect in light of exuberant bold claims of wealth and riches, Breakthrough Advertising is one that is profound yet simple enough that not many can make real bottom line results claims like those being portrayed about it. Its so profound that its worthy of some serious blog posts in my opinion. Because of this, I’ve dusted off the cover of this well preserved classic and have added a few post subjects to my list for further exploration. But how to approach it from a designers, Real Estate, internet business perspective?

Fearful of projecting the GRQ (Get Rich Quick) mindset so often played out in online products that claim to foster great success, the approach in writing about this book and its subjects must be handled intelligently. Following the conventional wisdom of professional guru’s like Jay Abraham or David Bendah (Lion Publishing), I’m motivated to write a weekly post on marketing websites and internet products because so much can be clarified by these authors. Please stay tuned.

So what makes this book so valuable

Well, fundamentals for one! The wisdom in Breakthrough Advertising is such that when long time professional mail order marketer Bob Stone and Michael Senoff suggest it as a must read, it quckly takes on compounding value. Both of these experts among many others all agree that no single book is as profound in principle as this one for the mail order or direct advertising marketer.

The book is so valuable because its very hard to find, in high enough demand by professionals that want results and its so easy to follow that a 10 year old could apply its principles. Thats why its so valuable. If you ever wanted to just start selling your products now, without all the trial and error, this book becomes very valuable then. I mean seriously, how much is a costly advertising campaign really worth to you if it fails? Certainly more than the value of this book.

But enough about how great the book is. I’ll simply say that this post serves as an introduction to future posts as I examine, adapt and write about principles in my blog on a per chapter basis.

Effective Inspirational Motivating Copy Writing

Its the direction I’m going in future posts. Appearance is golden but content is “king”! No truer words could ever be said. Search engines don’t index sites based on the beauty factor they do so based in part from content. If you could learn how to write well articulated and effective content, would that be of value to you? Consider before you answer, if web sites are indexed, linked to, discussed, and used, its because of your content and not you or your site. Its bold arrogance to believe anyone cares about you, your design and your websites features if it doesn’t provide people what they are after.

People could care less for the most part how your site looks. Although that sounds like a self contradiction considering the business I’m in; I’m fully capable of keeping it real as I convey to people with frequency that design is very important only after…..? After “Content”, because its content that gives sites their utility value, all the rest is window dressing and presentation.

So if its interesting to you to read about copywriting, I’m going to explore many of the fundamentals in good copy writing by simply sharing conventional wisdom and tried and true fundamentals in future posts. Breakthrough Advertising will be foundation in my writings on the subject.

Until then….

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.

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 OpenRealty 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.

osCommerce Version 3

Posted on June 18, 2007
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osCommerce New CSS Template Structure

Long over due but and certainly welcomed is the osCommerce version 3 alpha 4 release. With this release we were able to get a peek inside the new methods being attributed to a more compliant design structure as the default layout is nearly all CSS.

This version of osCommerce will likely bring down the price in stock templates across the board as a template support and methods are greatly enhanced and much easier to work with as designers will discover.

I brief look at some of the features;
* New object-oriented framework
* New installation routine
* register_globals and magic_quotes_gpc compatibility
* New template structure implementation
* Search-engine optimizations
* Service modules
* Checkout procedure cleanup
* New language definitions implementation
* Updated payment modules with post-transaction actions
* Catalog front-end, administration tool, and installation routine combined
* XHTML/CSS based default template layout for the catalog side
* Multiple product images implementation
* New action modules
* Administration Tool access levels
* Administrator Log
* Administration Tool batch action capabilities
* HTML Editor for product descriptions
* Full zone entries for most countries
* Language injection feature for similar languages
* GeoIP Modules for the Administration Tool Who’s Online section
* … and more! (application_top.php has never been so clean!)

Professional PHP Applications

Okay so play time is over and after many years of hacks, tweaks and hobby code, PHP has reached a level in application development that corporations are taking it real serious. Granted PHP isn’t quite as robust as ASP among others, PHP has managed to hold its own quite well and developers are beginning to take it a great deal more serious. Joomla, osCommerce, and several other application developers are delivering earth shaking quality applications based on lessons learned from all those years of discovery. The overall quality of php applications available on the internet is almost as pronounced as the overall quantity. PHP milestones are being set as application developers and serious businesses start to pursue this easy to learn and easy to implement code engine at exponential pace.

All I can say is “It’s about time”

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.

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