Set Yourself Apart With the Right Virtual Tour
By admin:
Since all real marketing of homes for sale now is done on the internet, you need to provide your sellers with a way to display the great images you take of their homes to potential buyers. Enter the virtual tour.
I don’t mean those 360 degree tours of years past. I mean a website dedicated to providing information and superb, high quality photos, school information, maps and property details about the home.
My hobby is photography (hobby is not really the right word) and I dabble in web design – both a result of my desire to have better marketing for my real estate clients. I saw a post on Larry’s real estate photography blog early this week and it got me inspired to put together a something that I could be proud of to help market my listings in a better way than I have in the past. Larry’s blog has a way of doing that for a lot of people. If you aren’t a regular there, you should check it out.
Back to the Virtual Tour – this is what I made for my listings and if you want it, you can download and use it yourself: http://atlantainfocus.com/elegant-virtual-tour/
You can download both the branded and unbranded versions
Now, before you download it, you need to know that the virtual tours run on WordPress so you need to have your own domain and know how to install and run WordPress. The theme has a readme text file that will help you get the virtual tour set up pretty quickly.
I’ve taken the extra step of creating a WordPress MU site and uploaded these 2 themes for use with multiple virtual tours very quickly. If you have that kind of skill, go for it! You will not be disappointed. All you have to do is upload your photos and create your pages and you are done.
In the coming days, I’ll create a page for downloadable themes with a tutorial for them. For now, if you have any questions, you can email me from my email address in the readme file or post in the comments below.
Rememeber, own your home turf!
Category: Free WordPress Themes, Real Estate, WordPress | No Comments »
Essential WordPress Plugins for Real Estate
By admin:
At the time of writing this, the WordPress repository for plugins has over 17,000 available – many of which are really cool and can work great for specific needs. For a real estate website, you do need a few to get you going, but there are many that perform similar functions. Here is a quick list of the essentials needed to get your site going:
- Jetpack – you can install Google Analytics or you can use Jetpack. It doesn’t have some of the custom functionality available from Google, but is easy to install and works great for site statistics. It tracks visitors, referring websites, search terms and more.
- All-in-one-seo-pack – This is a greta way to make sure that your titles, meta tags and keywords are controlled. Easy to use and highly recommended.
- Contact Form 7 – Simple and flexible contact form with customizable fields.
- WP-DB-Backup – Don’t run your website without it.
- NextGEN Gallery – Flexible photo gallery plugin.
- MapPress Easy Google Maps – flexible and very easy to use and embed in a post or a page.
Those are the basics. You may be interested in others for listings such as Great Real Estate or others, but you should get some of these installed and see what you want to do with your site first.
Suggestions?
Let me know what you use and what you recommend. My suggestion is to keep it as simple as possible and add things that will help users. Don’t worry any more about SEO than installing a plugin to make sure your titles, tags and descriptions are in order. SEO is not about keyword stuffing, etc, but I digress…
Category: Plugins, Real Estate, WordPress | No Comments »