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

• Branded
• Unbranded

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!

The most important thing on the site is the page from which consumers search for homes. It’s called your IDX page. IDX stands for Internet Data Exchange. It’s the reciprocal agreement between brokers in a given MLS to allow the sharing of their listings on other broker and agent websites.

The link title to this page is usually ‘Listings’ or ‘Search Listings’ or ‘Search Homes’ or something like that. The name you give it is less important – although I think it’s important for the title to be clear and descriptive. This page will receive the vast majority of your traffic. On our website, about 85% of the traffic goes to the various search listings pages.

Optimize to Get Users to This Page

Instead of using your homepage (the most likely page users will land on first) to talk about you, make sure there are nice Call to action images and language to get people to what they want to see or, if you have a custom IDX, make sure you have some sort of quick search for users because if they can’t easily find your listings, they will simply find another website that makes it easier.

In my opinion, images work better for this than text. It’s faster to see a large, well designed button that it is to ready itty bitty text which may or may not have an underline indicate a link depending how your website is styled.

Don’t leave it to chance either. We have multiple places and ways for users to get to our listings. Everyone uses websites a little bit differently and you want to be sure you have as many types of users covered as possible so don’t skimp and do test. Nothing works better than a little bit of testing to make sure you have things working right so don’t be afraid to change things up.

What Users Don’t Want

You. It’s that simple. Until you get their contact information and call them or they inquire about a property, very few of the people who come to your website have any interest in you. The exception here would be if you have a blog that you keep updated with timely and relevant information, but that is for a different day. For now, you need to make sure that the pages your users land on have an easy way for them to get to the pages that really matter. The actually real estate, of course!

I’ll be selling my iPad as with the Air, I really won’t have a use for it.

The MacBook Air is a full fledged computer. It runs flash, has a file management system, turns on instantly and otherwise operates in ways that an iPad can’t. It costs more – the one I picked up retails for $1199, but it has twice the storage and a real computer processor. It’s actually faster than my MacBook Pro. It’s thin and it’s an Apple so it doesn’t have some of the security issues associated more commonly with a PC. This is not a netbook. The battery life is also fantastic. We need to be able to pick up and go. The MAcBook Air is the best solution on the market and in my opinion better than any PC offering.

As an example of why this is better, I’m writing this post from it right now. This isn’t something I could do on an iPad because you can’t use a WYSIWYG editor.

Yes, it’s a little more expensive than the top of the line iPad, but it’s worlds more useable. You owe it to yourself to at least check it out.

• 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…