We love WordPress. We’ve been integrating WordPress blogs into our niche focused community websites for a few years now. We’ve been able to style the blogs to match our websites design and we’ve just taken this to the next level.

We have now replicated the design and functionality of our hand coded sites and created a version of it using the WordPress platform. What you get is the the same customization, style, and functionality but now at a fraction of the cost of our hand coded sites.

We can still theme each site to suit your individuality. We create a custom tailored banner image, (which we give you to use in your offline marketing), if you can think of a color scheme you can have it and we’ll train you how to add all your content.

Our IDX feed integrates seamlessly into your site as well your niche focused jump searches.

The WordPress open framework allows you to add new sections, pages and posts whenever you are ready. If you get stuck, are are unsure of anything were are here with our ongoing support.

[Check out our live demo here ]

[Read more about it here]

Want more love for your wordpress blog? One way to get your lovely posts more eyeballs is to make sure you are notifying as many ‘services’ that your blog has been updated.

It’s true that your wordpress blog already pings search engines when you post, but it doesnt hurt to make sure, and to ping more.

WordPress SEO

Click Settings from the left menu, and then click, Writing:

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In the Writing page, scroll down to Update Services, you’ll notice that pingomatic is already there. However you can notify way more than the pingomatic services.

Click the Update Services link.

This will bring you to a WordPress.org page:

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Scroll down to the bottom of this page where you will see a list titled: XML-RPC Ping Services

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Highlight and copy that list. The paste it into your Update Services list on your Writing page, in Settings.

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Click Save Changes to and you are all set.

**Check out our NEW  Wordpress Real Estate theme here!**

limeyboy.com helps real estate agents get more from the web! How can we help you?

Ok, so I admit it, I love pixel graphics. I love bar codes too. I don’t what it is about them that is just graphically fascinating, the negative space perhaps? We’ve seen these newer QR codes on our UPS & FedEx packages that come to the office from time to time and really liked them, and now they seem to be coming the main stream.

Although they are very pleasing to my human eye, they are actually designed to be read by your mobile device (formerly known as a telephone). Your phone scans the image, like the bar code reader in the grocery store, and your phone’s browser will then take you a predetermined website address…such as your listing.

Recently, very recently, we have started hearing requests from real estate agents we work with about incorporating them into their marketing.

The suggestion is that you place this on your yard sign for example and folks scan it, and then are taken to your site.

All sounds good, although this is predicated upon your potential client having downloaded the app onto their “device formerly known as a telephone” so that they can read this and make sense out of it.

At the moment, this is something that the usual gang of tech-comfy-agents, want to do, who knows if it will hit mainstream.

For me though, this really reminds me of a device that we were sent during the dot-com madness. It was an additional mouse which sat your your desk, (which tragically looked like a mouse of the furry nature), and it was essentially a bar code reader. You would bring your bar codes to your desk, and then scan them to be taken to the company’s website. Having gone through the kitchen pantry shelves, the novelty wore off pretty fast.

For me, using the phone’s GPS location software to pin point you outside a home for sale is a much more likely avenue for the future, than this method.

Are your client’s asking you about this?

Just as no two real estate agents offer the same mix of knowledge and service, the same is true for web development companies. However do you know what you should be asking a real estate web design company?

Most agent seem to select a web design company using the following criteria:

1. aesthetics
2. functionality
3. cost

Aesthetics as subjective at best. Real estate agents often see examples of existing sites and decide they would like something along those lines. Graphics can be changed easily.

Functionality. Lots of real estate agents are sold on the sites functionality, such as:

• being able to log in and add/edit their own content.
• perhaps there are a selection of canned emails that can be sent out from the site on a periodic basis that is perceived as solving the ‘staying in touch’ conundrum.

Cost is an objective component. Everyone has a budget, and as an agent you have to be comfortable with the bottom line.

However, this leaves a lot of questions unanswered, largely because there were never thought to be asked in the first place.

Customer is always right….wrong

When a real estate agent embarks on the process of creating a new website, first on the list should be that the website is designed to show up online. No one has ever argued with that statement when we make it.

However, due to the level of competitiveness in online real estate search, clearly you can’t show up for everything you would like your site to show up for. It’s obvious to most agents that they don’t have much chance in showing up for “USA real estate agent”, there are 100′s of millions of sites competing for that one.

So, if agent’s know there site isn’t going to up at that level of general search, at what level do they think it IS realistic for their site to start to show up?

Most real estate web developers entirely refuse to discuss realistic expectations of their sites showing with their potential customers.

However, what they do say is “Your can have what you want”. In essence they leave it up to what ever you, the customer wants without offering any guidance or counseling regarding the likelyhood of the shiny new site showing up anywhere. There is absolutely no reason why a real estate agent should have inkling how to get their site to show up.

Does your website strategy compliment the recent changes to google's interface?

Google has updated their user interface this week, thats the bit you use, and a ton of stuff that you don’t see. You may have noticed a subtle change in the way it looks, (that always throws me, my first reaction is that i have some malware installed, which has redirected me to a scam site!).

Really, the update brings some of the features that were ‘snuck’ in last time to the fore.

Type in a search query and you get the same set of results in essentially the same format. This is google’s ‘everything’ set of data. What’s new is the left column.

At the top you have, ‘everything’, all normal so far. Below that, they have moved the Maps, Images, Videos, News, Blogs etc to a much more prominent position. This means that its going to be more likely that people are going to perform subsequent search variations, from their original entry search.

As a real estate agent, you should make sure that your online strategies try cover all of these bases. Make sure that your website and blogs are loaded with local images, town images, development images, videos of the above, (even quickies from your smart phone) and blog posts.

Below, the ‘everything’ navigation is another category, More Search Tools, this is where users can find the most up to date information posted to the web. You can sort your results by the time they were updated such as latest, past 24 hrs, past week, past month, past year. Latest may show your twitter tweets!

I’ll say it again, you have to be blogging!