About Showcase Website
About Showcase Website
These pages are intended to provide other brokers and agents who may be interested in a website similar to our showcase website, with technical information about the site and its capabilities. Some of the information is very general, and some is more technical. If you find yourself getting lost in the technical stuff, that’s where we come in: to help you get a similar real estate website up and producing leads for you without having to deal with the technicalities yourself!
General Information
- Built on WordPress (Currently v. 3.2), originally a blogging software platform, that has matured significantly over the past few years, and is now also a pretty good CMS (Content Management System). Due to its relative simplicity and great flexibility, as well as it’s capabilities as a strong blogging platform and its low cost (free, open source), WordPress has become a favorite platform for affordable yet powerful real estate websites.
- Fully and tightly integrated with and hosted by UltimateIDX. This is an IDX and RETS capable advanced real estate search product, with support for single agent, small office / team, and large office versions depending on your needs. See their website.
- Highly customized and proprietary IDX search forms, search summary results and property details pages. These started out as basic “as delivered” UltimateIDX templates and capabilities, which we have since invested hundreds of hours in extensive customizations to support all available Denver MetroList MLS data elements and our own design and preferences for the layouts. These can and have been further customized for other brokers needs and preferences.
- The “Affinity” theme from RocketThemes WordPress themes club (July 2009), somewhat modified to make it simpler and more robust, and with extensive css (styling) modifications to suit my own tastes and preferences and provide some special enhanced functionality specific to real estate websites.
- Lots of 3rd party WordPress plugins, including (See WordPress.org for details):
- Add Descendants As Submenu Items (WordPress custom menu enhancement)
- cForms (Contact form, Home Valuation Request form, others)
- CMS Tree Page View (Organize and manage lots and lots of content pages)
- Dot HTML,PHP,XML etc Pages (Adds .html suffix to all urls for backward compatibility with my older website urls)
- Google XML Sitemaps (Builds xml site maps for Google and other search engines)
- Great Real Estate (Used for my “Featured Listings”)
- Include It (Includes any other external html or php file to a page – used extensively for my “Smart” pages)
- NextGEN Gallery (Used to manage gallerys of photos / images for “Featured Listings”)
- No Page Comment (Turns off WordPress standard commenting system for select pages)
- Page Security by Contexture (Implements a “role” based security scheme for accessing site content)
- Platinum SEO Pack (Allows creation of flexible meta tags for better SEO, with low overhead, and key to our “Smart Pages” php code and implementation)
- Shortcode Exec PHP (Builds custom WordPress “shortcodes” for frequently used functions)
- Simple Real Estate Packx (Extends and enhances Great Real Estate for “Featured Listings” and also for our subdivision “Smart Pages”)
- Spam Free WordPress (Filters comments and pingbacks and blocks spam entries – essential!)
- TinyMCE Advanced (Advanced content editor. Supports custom theme css for a true “WYSIWYG editor experience)
- Widget Logic (Customize which pages widgets appear on, such as my many small menus)
- WP Realtime Sitemap (Provides a user friendly and readable site map page for the site)
- … a few others, to be listed later
The time and effort to find, implement, test and customize all of these WordPress plugins was a major task! In all, including basic WordPress installation and configuration, integration of the UltimateIDX product (not including my proprietary customizations), implementation and customization of the Affinity theme, and installation and testing of the plugins, we spend over 80 hours just building this site’s infrastructure. You can take advantage of our experience for your new site. Now that we have done it, we can build a comparable site for you in under 12 hours, minus the hundreds of pages of content of course! That’s extra, or you can do it yourself or hire a content writer after we train you how.