You are here: Home / Archives for How-To Guides

How To Use a Premium WordPress Theme To Create An Awesome Single Property Site

January 22, 2010 by · 3 Comments

I love Twitter. I love it because you get to meet so many interesting people and learn new things that you wouldn’t have otherwise been aware of had someone not tweeted it out. One such cool thing I saw recently was Jay Thompson’s (@phxreguy) single property website for his newest listing at 490 E. Elgin St in Gilbert, AZ.

Using the Thesis WordPress theme Jay created a destination site that makes use of Thesis’ media box to display random photos of the home on every page, links to local and school websites and a fantastic photo gallery.

The site also pulls double duty as a search portal by adding a real estate search to the site. This will be a tremendous feature of the site should a home buyer visit the site, pass on the home and want to view similar homes in the area.

For non-WordPress junkies you can check out the single property website service from AgencyLogic to create similar results.

To see Jay’s single property site in full click here.

This post contains affiliate links. Find out why we use affiliate links by clicking here.

Filed Under: Marketing, Premium Themes, WordPress · Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Realtors: A Better Answer to “How’s the Market” [VIDEO]

January 18, 2010 by · 4 Comments

Real Estate Agents are missing a golden opportunity to demonstrate their expertise when they answer this question with vague rhetoric. Here’s a Better Way…

Filed Under: How-To Guides, Media, Video · Tagged With: ,

Monday Q&A: How Do You Take Pole Aerial Photos?

January 18, 2010 by · 3 Comments

When it comes to setting yourself apart from the competition every distinguishing factor helps. One great way to stand out is by using pole aerial photography (PAP). PAP is a photo technique where you take photos of a home with a camera attached to the top of a pole in the air. It helps you capture a bird’s eye view of a home and its surroundings by hovering above them which is a perspective rarely seen in real estate photos.

Question:

“How do you take pole aerial photos?”

Answer:

Taking pole aerial photos is as simple as building an inexpensive photo rig to hold your camera (I recommend a digital camera with an anti-shake aka optical stabilization feature) up in the air. My PAP mount is similar to the one built by Larry at PhotographyforRealEstate.net and will cost about $60 to make if you’re handy.

To build the mount I have you need:

If you’re not handy try to find a neighbor, friend or family member who is because creating the mount requires some hands-on effort getting your pole, tripod head and threaded rod to come together.

Poles typically range in size from 8 feet tall all the way up to 30 feet or more. My mount is 16 feet tall which I’ve found to be pretty good for most photo scenarios. A secondary benefit of a telescoping pole that reaches a max of 16 feet is how mobile the rig is. My pole shrinks to just under 6 feet at its shortest so I can still transport it in my Mazda 3.

Tip: If you find yourself taking photos of 2+ story home exteriors that are on hilly terrain you may want to consider going with a pole longer than 16 feet to make up for the difference between the ground level the home sits on and where you are standing with the pole.

Once you have your PAP mount ready to go just set your camera to a custom timer (I use 30 seconds), screw your camera onto the monopod head, raise it into the air and snap as many pics as you can. Most digital point-and-shoot cameras can take 3-4 pictures in a row which, when combined with the timer, almost always ensures a few good shots.

If PAP is something you really take a great amount of interest in I recommend reading about more advanced options including adding an LCD tv to your camera so you can see what you’re shooting and vehicle mounted masts to get an even higher perspective on the properties you’re shooting.

This post contains affiliate links. Find out why we use affiliate links by clicking here.

Filed Under: How-To Guides, Marketing, Monday Q&A, Photography · Tagged With: , , , , , ,

List of Premium WordPress Theme Websites

January 13, 2010 by · 6 Comments

Hot on the heels of our Monday Q&A: “What is a Premium WordPress Theme?”, I’ve created a list of premium WordPress theme websites that I visit often and more info about each company’s products. Be sure to consider how you plan to use your website before buying a premium theme.

For example, say you find a great premium WordPress theme with a magazine layout. Magazine layouts tend to highlight 5-10 of your latest blog posts, often dated, so you can show off your latest articles to your readers. If you never or rarely blog on your site then you would be better off with a page based theme or a theme that focuses on a few key navigation points versus the number of posts that you have.

To help make choosing a premium WordPress theme easier there is a short description about what themes are offered at each website, pricing information and link to their sites below:

WooThemes

WooThemes

Price Range: $70 – $140 per theme. Club membership starts at $125 upfront and $15 per month for unlimited all theme access.

About WooThemes: WooThemes is a personal favorite of mine. I use their designs on my own real estate website, my Mazda 3 car site and here at ORE 101. There is a huge selection of niche WordPress themes including business site themes and magazine style designs in addition to great tech support on their forums. I really appreciate the number of color options you have for each theme and the continuous updates to ensure the designs are bug free.

Learn more about WooThemes.

Elegant Themes

Elegant Themes

Price Range: $19.95 per year for unlimited all theme access.

About Elegant Themes: Bargain alert! I’ve used Elegant Themes on occasion because their designs are so polished though few of them would be suitable for a real estate website right out of the box. Forum tech support was quick to respond to any questions I had about the themes and at $19 per year it’s absolutely worth joining if you find a theme you love.

Learn more about Elegant Themes.

AgentPress

StudioPress

Price Range: $59.95 per theme. Club membership is $199.95 and includes all themes available on the site, future updates and future new theme releases.

About StudioPress: Brian Gardner, creator of StudioPress, was one of the first to offer premium WordPress themes to the masses. There is a great collection of themes to choose from over at StudioPress including the Agent Theme which was designed specifically for real estate agents. In my experience forum support has been excellent and Brian goes out of his way to personally respond to distress signals.

Learn more about StudioPress themes.

AgentPress

AgentPress

Price Range: $99.95 per theme. Service packages (including theme and plug-in installation) run $199.95 – $299.95. All service packages require that you use one of AgentPress’ recommended web hosting companies.

About AgentPress: A spin-off of the highly successful Agent Theme by StudioPress and customized with even more real estate website specific features by Nicole Nicolay (aka @nik_nik), AgentPress is a great theme to consider when building your website. It looks like forum support is still managed through StudioPress which, as mentioned before, is excellent.

Learn more about AgentPress themes.

Gorilla Themes

Price Range: $79.95 and up for individual themes. $139.95+ for developer license (includes PSD file.)

About Gorilla Themes: Gorilla Themes caught my eye with their extensive (and growing) number of real estate agent/broker specific WordPress themes. As of this writing there are six (6) agent/broker themes available including one of their newest themes: Broker Real Estate theme.

Learn more about Gorilla Themes real estate themes.

iThemes

Price Range: $79.95 and up for individual themes. $499.95 gives you an all-access pass for 1 year to every iThemes theme available.

About iThemes: iThemes offers mostly business related themes and theme frameworks (see more on theme frameworks below). Some of my favorite business themes from iThemes are Yukon, Essence and iCompany.

Learn more about iThemes.

Theme Forest

Price Range: $12 and up.

About Theme Forest: Theme Forest is a collection of HTML templates like WordPress themes that are available for sale from independent designers and companies. TF isn’t a traditional theme club but more of a marketplace so do proper due diligence on each seller you purchase a theme from.

Also, be sure to ask or read about how the seller supports their product when it comes to updates and fixing quirks you experience personally. The theme in the picture above is a real estate theme I found on Theme Forest.

Learn more about Theme Forest.

Theme Frameworks

Theme frameworks are a variant of premium WordPress themes with a different spin. Instead of being ready to use right out of the box they are highly customizable, fully featured foundation themes that you build custom designs on top of. The amount of work that will go into customizing one of these frameworks depends on your needs.

For example, Jay Thompson (PhoenixRealEstateGuy.com) uses the Thesis WordPress theme (see below) with a custom skin as his primary blog design. Skins, also known as child themes, are designs built on top of a theme framework. The theme framework is still the same but the visual design of the website changes.

Thesis WordPress Theme

Thesis

Price Range: $87 (For use on one website) to $164 (For use on any sites that you own)

About Thesis: The creation of Chris Pearson, previously most well known as the designer of the free Cutline and Copyblogger themes, Thesis is an extremely powerful yet lightweight theme framework. It’s optimized for SEO with a built-in SEO configuration panel on every post/page, has a ton of customizable options from the backend control panel (control font size, header placement etc.) and a thriving support community.

Learn more about the Thesis theme framework.

Headway WordPress Theme

Headway

Price Range: $87 (For use on up to two websites that you own) to $164 (unlimited installs on websites that you own)

About Headway: Headway is a relative newcomer to the premium WordPress theme market but they’ve wasted no time making a big splash. One of the many unique features about Headway is the visual editor in the backend. This visual editor lets you edit your website’s design and layout without ever having to touch a line of code.

Learn more about the Headway theme framework.

This post contains affiliate links. Find out why we use affiliate links by clicking here.

Filed Under: How-To Guides, Premium Themes, WordPress · Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Monday Q&A: What Is A Premium WordPress Theme?

January 11, 2010 by · 1 Comment

The popularity of WordPress spawned a significant number of free website designs, also known as themes, over the past couple of years. Because the designs were free they were also used heavily throughout the community which created a sort of design monotony among WordPress sites. The lack of technical support coupled with infrequent bug fixes for freebie themes sent webmasters in search of a better solution.

Before premium themes your only other styling option was to hire a designer and coder to give your site a custom look all its own. Though certainly worth the cost of admission, custom designs can be cost prohibitive with total project costs upwards of $2,000 or more depending on your level of customization. On to today’s question…

Question:

“What is a premium WordPress theme?”

Answer:

A premium WordPress theme fills the void between freebie themes and custom design work by providing a high quality, super affordable and often ready-to-use website design for less than $100. At this price point it’s affordable to experiment with different site designs and color schemes for your website. There are a few points to consider before buying a premium theme including:

  • How will you use your site? For business blogs or real estate websites running WordPress as a CMS you’ll definitely want to go custom or with a premium theme. Free themes are acceptable for personal blogs but reflect poorly on your business because it shows that you tried to build your website as inexpensively as possible. This could project the idea that you cut corners wherever possible to save money which is NOT the story you want your website to tell!
  • What type of content will you be posting (video, podcasts, written articles)? Some premium themes are built around a specific niche (band pages or brochure websites) so you’ll want to make sure your premium theme supports the content you’re looking to publish.
  • Does the premium theme company support its products well? I’ve seen some beautiful WordPress themes out there where the developer only releases one or two updates or none at all to fix bugs that could cause your premium theme to be unusable. Rule of thumb: An active support forum and quick bug fixes are signs of a well supported product. Look for change logs that show what changes have been made under each version number.

A great way to research company support and customer satisfaction is to use Twitter search. When Twitter users are happy or mad about a product they almost always tweet about it. Use Twitter search to find out about their experiences so you can have more control over your experience.

Do you use a premium WordPress theme on your site? Have any theme clubs that you prefer?

Filed Under: Monday Q&A, Online Branding, Premium Themes, Technology, Website Tips, WordPress · Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Monday Q&A: Should I Have A Live Chat Box On My Real Estate Website?

January 4, 2010 by · 9 Comments

Our second installment of Monday Q&A brings us to a website feature that’s been picking up in popularity lately: a live chat box. Live chat boxes are available through Google via GoogleTalk, Diverse Solutions (DsAgentChat) and third party chat providers.

The idea behind a live chat box is that your website visitor can get in touch with you immediately when browsing your site thus increasing the opportunity to convert them into a client. That leads us into our question below:

Question:

“Should I have a chat box on my real estate website?”

Answer:

A live chat box, like any other lead capture feature, is a great thing to have on your website provided you account for a few potential caveats that come with it. On one hand your website visitors can engage you immediately about any questions they have or to request specific property details. That’s a very good thing. Unfortunately, I think the downsides outweigh the potential good a chat box can do.

After using a live chat box on my website (via DsAgentChat) for the past year I noticed a few trends that resulted in me eventually leaving the chat app on my desktop turned off most of the time.

  1. Live chat users interrupt your workflow. – Most of the visitors who used the live chat to contact me only sought answers to a couple questions and then ended the chat session. This is counterproductive because a live chat window opening on my desktop would interrupt whatever I was doing at the computer. I liken it to someone walking up to you while you’re on the phone and just talking at you until you pay attention to them.
  2. The chat lead conversion ratio is pretty low. – After responding to questions from visitors who had no intention to continue speaking with me beyond the chat window I started to see the chat as a time and resource drain. It’s very similar to when you get an email and name inquiry with no phone number included except you have a live conversation in between; it might lead to something but the odds aren’t in your favor.
  3. If you don’t respond right away you may lose out on a prospective client. - With the immediacy of live chat your website visitor expects a fast reply to all of their questions. Now, say you leave your computer to grab a water bottle or you’re on a phone call with a client. That time away from the chat box could cost you a lead who might have otherwise inquired on your site using contact forms or your IDX (both of which have more in-depth information requirements from your leads.)

There are some ways that you can help alleviate some of these concerns like using a virtual assistant to respond to chat leads or asking for their contact number before getting into answering questions. The question then is whether it’s worth going through all that trouble to respond to chat leads. For me, it’s not worth it.

As always, if you have any questions you would like to see answered here you can ask us on Twitter or by leaving a comment in the box below!

What has your experience been with live chat boxes on your website? Worth it or not?

Photo Credit: Cyron
Filed Under: How-To Guides, Lead Generation, Marketing, Monday Q&A, Technology · Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Monday Q&A: What’s The Difference Between WordPress.com and WordPress.org Sites?

December 28, 2009 by · 12 Comments

Every Monday we host a Q&A session where you can get your most pressing real estate tech/marketing questions answered. Questions for our next Monday Q&A can be sent to us via Twitter or by submitting a question in the comment box at the bottom of this post.

Question:

What’s the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org sites?

Answer:

Most first time bloggers and new users to WordPress find the two pretty confusing. WordPress.com and WordPress.org are actually nearly identical with the primary difference being that you can get your blog hosted for free at WordPress.com.

WordPress.org offers the same easy-to-use blogging software that you get on WordPress.com but as a download so you can install it on your self-hosted website. So, to answer simply, WordPress.com is like WordPress.org Lite.

I’ve charted out the key differences between the two below:

What’s Good About WordPress.com

  • Free blog hosting, next to nothing start up costs. (Register and create your blog, it’s that easy!)
  • A huge collection of pre-approved website designs to choose from.
  • Low maintenance — Your blog software is automatically updated to the latest version for you.
  • Community features – Visit WordPress.com and you can see the hottest new post from other blogs hosted on the service.

What’s Not So Good About WordPress.com

  • Very limited in flexibility; not for power users.
  • Lots of little upgrade expenses to customize your blog (i.e. custom domain name, video hosting, customize website design.)
  • You can’t upload your own website design (important if you want to buy a premium WordPress theme to customize your site’s look.)
  • Zero plug-in options so if you want to add site features like the Next-Gen Photo Gallery you wouldn’t be able to.

What’s Good About WordPress.org (Self-Hosted WordPress Install)

  • Fully customizable and flexible. Once you install WordPress on your website you can use any design you want (custom, premium or free) and add extra plug-ins to expand site functionality (like Next-Gen Gallery).
  • No extra costs other than website hosting and domain registration.
  • Still low maintenance. – WordPress 2.8+ offers two-click automatic software upgrades and plug-in upgrades from within the WordPress dashboard.
  • Never pay for extra storage space. – Most web hosting companies these days offer terabytes (1,000 gigabytes) of storage (often seen in “Unlimited” hosting plans) which means you’ll never have to worry about having too much stuff stored on your website.

What’s Not So Good About WordPress.org (Self-Hosted WordPress Install)

  • If you break it, you fix it. – You are fully responsible for maintaining your site. If your site gets hacked, you install a rogue plug-in that kills the site or botch an upgrade it’s on you to fix it. Thankfully the WordPress.org support forums are an excellent resource for newbies.
  • Takes a little bit longer to get your website set up. – With WordPress.com sites there are pre-installed plug-ins that cover features like polls, video hosting and post/page ratings. When you do a self-install (WordPress.org) you have to set that up yourself. Not hard but it does take more time.

In the end, it’s up to you and your skill level to decide whether you want to host your blog on a private server or jump in and play right away within the walled garden of WordPress.com.

If you plan to build an entire business website using WordPress software as a CMS (Content Management System) then doing a self-hosted install is the best way to go. For casual bloggers or people who aren’t looking to run a full time business with their blogs, WordPress.com will suit you just fine.

Did you find this article helpful? Have more questions you would like to see answered in our Monday Q&A? Submit your questions and feedback on this article using the comment box below!

Filed Under: How-To Guides, Monday Q&A, Website Tips, WordPress · Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Launching December 28th!

December 7, 2009 by · 6 Comments

Get ready, we’re launching on December 28th! :)

Filed Under: Android Apps, Experiments, Facebook, How-To Guides, iPhone Apps, Lead Generation, Marketing, Media, Mobile Apps, Monday Q&A, Online Branding, Plug-Ins, Premium Themes, Screencasts, SEO, Social Media, Technology, Twitter, Website Tips, WordPress ·
Newer Posts »