WordPress › Support » Finalist for "Best Real Estate Blog in Texas"

mattregister
Member
Posted 2 years ago #

I built my wife a real estate site using a completely custom wordpress theme. There are some pretty slick customizations in there. I would love feedback.

Her blog is currently a finalist for "Best Real Estate Blog in Texas" from the Mays Business School Real Estate Center at Texas A&M University. Voting is going on now until next Tuesday. To vote you send this guy an email. I made a form to make voting easier.

Check out the site and let me know what you think.
the front page of her site: http://buyandsellwithshannon.com
The voting page (voting takes 3 seconds, tops. Type your name and hit send.): http://buyandsellwithshannon.com/vote

Thanks in advance for your feedback and voting support.

Matt
mattregister
Member
Posted 2 years ago #

Thanks for your support guys. She has gotten several votes from here. Any feedback on the site?
eatingrocks
Member
Posted 2 years ago #

The blog looks really good. I like the arrows for the buyer/seller and the website looks really professional. The load time is very slow though I put it through http://analyze.websiteoptimization.com and it would not work "Your request returned no data. Please check your url and try again" However, I think it might be your server?

When I clicked on the link it was just slow though but took a minute or two to show up.

Looks good though & good luck!
mattregister
Member
Posted 2 years ago #

My server is acting slow today. That is usually not a problem. I cannot get the analyze website to take either.

Thanks for the feedback. She has been doing this for only 9 months (selling real estate) and has had phenomenal success because of the site. Most real estate agents are on the internet, but most of them are bad at it. a little wordpress magic and she is easily found.
mattregister
Member
Posted 2 years ago #

found the slow down problem. It was a plugin causing the problem. disabled it, back up to speed.
mattregister
Member
Posted 2 years ago #

Hey guys, thanks for voting. She won the contest for the "Best Real Estate Blog in Texas"!
tph093s
Member
Posted 2 years ago #

Matt,

I love your wife's site! Great job! I am very interested in how you did this for her. I have a website of my own but over the past couple weeks have been seriously considering making my own website from WordPress. I would appreciate any help you could give. The site she has is impressive, interactive, smooth, and flashy. I found myself on the site for well over ten mintes.
mattregister
Member
Posted 2 years ago #

Thanks for the complements on the site. It is working extremely well for her. I am not a web guy. I am actually an investment banker that started building a couple of sites for non-profits. I found wordpress to be extremely adaptable to almost any situation.

When she first started selling real estate, we tried to think of what could set her apart from her competition in a tough market. we decided that she had to become very good at technology and its application to real estate. Against the advise of all of her peers, we built her own site.

Thinking through what she wanted to showcase on her site, she needed static pages (for general buying and selling info) and a blog /news/listings sections. WordPress out of the box is designed to display all posts in chronological order, but it can be manipulated to show one category at a time. Thats what you see; news is the news category archive, blog is the blog archive, featured listings is the listings archive, etc.

I started with an existing theme and started manipulating it. it is unrecognizable from where it started. send me a direct email and i would be happy to talk to you about it.

Matt
Matt(at)mattregister(dot)com
tph093s
Member
Posted 2 years ago #

Matt,

My email is tom dot hernandez at century21 dot com. Thanks for the help!
tonydomrep
Member
Posted 1 year ago #

Hello Matt,

about the design. I think its a great job what you did but the design is not really professional.

-its to full with different sizes, to many colors, no quietness
-to much advertising

positive:
-the iphone app. Very good.

Yours,
Tony
griffinjt
Member
Posted 1 year ago #

You have a good looking site built Matt! I'm impressed!
unutulmaz
Member
Posted 1 year ago #

Thank you for your sharing.!
mattregister
Member
Posted 1 year ago #

Thanks again for the feedback guys. Tony, you are absolutely right, the design is somewhat less than professional. It was not designed by a professional. I am not a graphic artist. I see what you mean but not sure exactly how to go about fixing that.

griffenjt and unutulmaz, glad you like it. this site has made a tremendous impact on her business. In the last couple of months (in a horrible real estate market) she has moved from an individual agent, to hiring agents under her and becoming a team. It makes all of the difference in the world when you are findable online and the phone rings from people finding her.

one of the interesting things is how we have been able to use rss feeds to increase the reach of her site. when she publishes a post on her site, it automatically sends a teaser posted to 4 different real estate blogs (trullia, houston association of realtors, active rain, etc) with the custom footer plugin marking where the post came from. It also automatically published to her twitter account. her twitter account automatically updates her linkedin status and her facebook page. It updates the social networking status of all of her employees (3 so far).
fastpara
Member
Posted 1 year ago #

Awesome Site Matt, Good luck in the comptetition. Hope You win!
mattregister
Member
Posted 1 year ago #

Thanks fastpara. This is a relatively old post. She won it in August. She has had tremendous success since then. The majority of her business comes from this site.
zrogers911
Member
Posted 1 year ago #

hey matt, i am currently working on a real estate site myself and its my first one. if you don't mind me asking who did you use for your mls listings?
mattregister
Member
Posted 1 year ago #

I used Houston association of realtors (our local mls service). They give realtors a page (on their site) so send buyers to search the database. Instead of sending her viewers to an external site, I just "iframed" it into her site. Nothing tricky there. I made a custom page template which included an iframe for the mls search form (and results) then wrote a page (including an introduction and links to her other search forms) and used that page template.

They also provide a few other search variations; school finder, map search, etc. Did the same things for them.

http://buyandsellwithshannon.com/home-finder/
mattregister
Member
Posted 1 year ago #

Sure. To start with, I made custom urls. (settings/permalinks) I set them to /%category%/%postname%/.

I then made a "home.php" file into my theme folder that basically controls how the front page is displayed. Basic html page that displays the content on her front page.

In my links (top of the page), I link to the category archive. Her blog would be http://buyandsellwithshannon.com/blog/ and her news category would be http://buyandsellwithshannon.com/news/ and her listings would be http://buyandsellwithshannon.com/featured-listings/ .

Keep in mind that posts can be in multiple categories. When she gets a new listing, it is added into the blog, featured-listings, and their individual neighborhood categories. this way it shows up in the blog and the "featured listings" page.

I then got tricky and made a couple of custom archive templates. (see the template documentation and template hierarchy in the documantation section). Doing this enables me to add some custom content to the beginning of the archive. For example, She sells homes in Spring Lakes subdivision. I have a domain name of http://buyspringlakes.com that redirects to http://buyandsellwithshannon.com/spring-lakes/ - this is her "spring-lakes" category. That custom archive template has a video, map and other neighborhood information before displaying her listings in that neighborhood.

Probably more information than you wanted but that is how i did it. One of the beautiful things of wordpress is with a little understanding of theme files, you can bend it to do things it was never intended to do.
mattregister
Member
Posted 1 year ago #

I know this is an old thread but I just redid the graphics on the site. That was the main thing it was missing... all the graphics were rather amateurish. I got a graphics guy to help us out and it makes all the difference in the world. What do you think?

http://buyandsellwithshannon.com
daviddavidson
Member
Posted 1 year ago #

I must hand it to you. This is one of the best I've seen for it's content. It's attractive without distracting from the content. Well done!
rainer23
Member
Posted 1 year ago #

Really awesome webdesign and topmost functional at the same time! Gratulations, you did a good job!
sybilleruth
Member
Posted 1 year ago #

You site is eye catching. Draws a person in to read what it is about.

[sig moderated as per the Forum Rules]
mattregister
Member
Posted 1 year ago #

Thanks for the complements, guys. This is a work in progress. Seems like every month or so I am tweaking the theme to customize something.

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Finalist for "Best Real Estate Blog in Texas" (23 posts)

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