1. Blog Title - Don’t forget to give your blog a title. Even if you decide to use graphics in your title like this,

Leaving this blank will make your title not recognizable by search engines. To have the best of both worlds, do this to your blog:

#pagetitle h1{

visibility:hidden;
}

2. Blogroll - change or add your personal blogroll links immediately by going to >>Blogroll >> Manage Blogroll >> AddLink
Usually your blog install will have default links that you may want to change to maximize your visitors benefit

3. Widgets - activate and drag your widgets into your sidebars. If widgets are not installed on certain themes , your blog layout will look broken.
This will not be a problem for installs 2.3.1 or greater.

4. Permalinks - make sure you set your permalink structure to "Custom" with a similar string "/%postname%/"
This will make your blog posts easily recognized and indexed.

5. RSS Feed - submit your new blog to Feedburner or any of your other favorite feed management systems so that site visitors can start subscribing to your posts,

install the FeedButton so that visitors have more RSS options

6. SPAM K2 - stop SPAM from the very beginning by installing Dr. Dave’s SPAM Karma plugin

7. Visual Editor - uncheck the “visual rich editor” so that you can embed YouTube videos and other 3rd party code. Goto “Users” >> “Your Profile” >> and scroll down to the very bottom to uncheck the editor under “Personal Options”

8. Sidebars - if you are running themes with multiple sidebars or sidebars on the wrong places, you can add/change them as you like by going to your
"sidebar.php" pages and adding the sidebar calls in the appropriate places.

< div id="leftsidebar">
<?php if ( function_exists(’dynamic_sidebar’) && dynamic_sidebar(2) ) : else : ?>
<?php endif; ?>
< /div>

Also, make sure the number of the sidebar corresponds to your desired location.

9. Headers - to change your site’s header, just follow your "header.php" file and find the corresponding ".jpg .png or .gif file extensions" that is called to display your header"

10. Themes - install several themes to get yourself thinking about the design and layout you want, then focus on one and start customizing
There are tons of themes to get you started, install many and switch through them until you find the right one, explore lots, its free.

 

1. Wordpress Theme Viewer - This is the original source for free Wordpress themes. Choose from 1000s of themes and designs with 2, 3, 4 column designs, fluid vs fixed width, and 2 to 20 sidebars.

2. Wordpress Themes Community- Free themes from several categories including several real estate specific themes here…

3. Template Monster - 400+ premium themes from Template Monster, templates starting from $50 but designs are unique and make your blog stand out from the crowd

4. 83 Themes with Clean Designs - this has been around for a long time, but these themes can be used over and over because of their clean designs and simplicity

5. Wordpress Theme Generator - design your own theme in minutes. Change background colors, link colors, font colors, font types and sizes and then download your rockin design

6. WPDesigner - best place for premium themes including the popular Digg-like theme

7. Revolution Premium Theme - by Brian Gardner this series of themes is great for community sites and news-style blogs starting at only $79.95

8. 1Click Install - This plugin essentially reduces the time required to install any plugin or theme to 10 seconds.

9. PSDtoHTML - do you need help turning your custom designs into XHTML and CSS code , this is the resource for you

10. iThemes.com - look out for this site in 2008 as it is predicted to be one of the best premium theme resources on the net because 2 of its founders are some of the most well respected blog designers including Cory Miller who designed GeekEStateBlog.com and Brian Gardner the Revolution godfather.

 

1. Wordpress - the official Wordpress plugin repository for all of your plugin and widget needs

2. Housing Widgets from Trulia is a great place to get real estate specific widgets

3. Widgetbox - more than 30,000 widgets for your blog

4. Wordpress Plugin Database - very neatly organized directory of Wordpress plugins allows you to get right to the source and download directly

5. 300 + Tools for your Wordpress Blog - Mashable has put together a comprehensive list of 300+ great tools for any Wordpress need

6. Captcha Plugin - fight spam with this CAPTCHA plugin

7. 1Click - reduces the effort needed to install a plugin or a theme for wordpress to just one simple click (Winner of the Wordpress Plugin Competition)

8. Smashing Magazine’s Wordpress Plugins List - another great collection of Wordpress plugins, tutorials, and ideas

9. QuickOnlineTips.com - clean and well organized list of plugins and widgets

10. And of course, our own plugins page is a great place to get started on real estate specific blogs.

 

1. Branded Header - the first impression of your blog starts with your header design. You may not need a completely customized theme, but a unique masthead/banner is the easiest way to make your blog looking professional. Start by taking photos and pictures of your local area of expertise and then adding personal touches such as your favorite fonts and color overlays. Your header theme will be the anchor for your whole site and will set the tone for your overall theme and design. For example, if you sell real estate in wine country, then take photos of wineries around the area and of course the homes in your area of expertise like this. Match your theme to your offline marketing.

2. All-In-One SEO Plugin - this is an awesome plugin to install and you can see the results immediately. It helps you tag each of your pages without having to write the same keywords over and over again.

3. Featured Listing Plugin - after you’ve installed this plugin, go to your "Options" >> "Featured Listings" page and configure this page with your Realivent account.
You can choose a specific listing to display as the default upon page load or you can leave it as "Do Not Use" to show a list of all of your featured listings. You can
also choose to format your page with one sidebar or no-sidebars.

4. Zillow CMA Plugin - after installing this plugin, go to "Options" >> "CMA Request" to tune this page.
Add your email address which will direct all site inquiries directly to you. Change the page title and again
choose your page format.

5. Agent Profile Plugin - you can certainly create your own about me page, but this plugin breaks your profile down into several categories and presents it nicely on your blog.
This one is easy, all you have to do is import your profile from Realivent.com by just entering your username and choosing your page layout. That’s it.

6. Property Watch Plugin - you have a lot of options here… just go to "Options" >> "Property Watch" >> then configure.
Add your email address where the property watch form will send the inquiry to. Page title, and choose your layout.
Here you also have the option to change your introductory message and response page directly. And finally, you can change
the colors of your widget to match your blog look and feel.

7. Altos Research Widgets - Install Altos Charts - get data analysis widgets for your city with lots of trending information including median price, days on market, and inventory.

8. Google Analytics - one of the best free analytics plugins to date. Install this and check it constantly to monitor
your site traffic and sources.

9. Google Sitemaps - get the sitemap plugin here then configure it by entering in your site URL .
Then go into your WordPress administration page, click on Plugins and activate it.
After that you will have a new menu point called "Sitemap" under the "Options" menu.
You can alter the default change frequencies, filename and other options there.
Click once on "Rebuild Sitemap" to create your sitemap the first time.

10. Blog Lab - last but not least Dave Smith at the Real Estate Blog Lab has a lot of Wordpress experiments going and lots of good SEO articles and tips. Head on over to the lab for some great detailed Wordpress science.

Tags:html Marketing Advice Plugins Realivent Updates sitemaps wordpress wordpress themes zillow

Popularity: 85% [?]

We just installed Google Translator on our sidebar. Now you can read our blog posts in Arabic, Chinese, French, Korean, Portugese, Russian and many more languages by clicking on the country’s flag. This is also available on all of our single property and agent blogs.

Why is this important ? Well first of all when we introduced our product in San Jose, CA the first comment was “this is a great product, do you have your product in Spanish ?” We didn’t have a solution at that time, but with more and more widgets now available for your websites, it was easy to find a solution. I recalled using Babelfish several years ago, but I could not find any widgets (a couple of months ago ) that allowed you to embed the translation tools directly on your site.

Here’s the code to install the translator on your site: (http://labnol.blogspot.com/2005/11/add-language-translation-to-website.html“>Courtesy of Digital Inspiration)

Tags:Fun Stuff html Realivent Updates widgets

Popularity: 43% [?]

I don't know why most themes don't have page templates included, but they should. Many times you will create a new Wordpress page, then go view it and the page is all funky because of the sidebar. The easiest solution is to save the page.php file as another filename, preferably, page_no_sidebar.php to keep it simple, and then remove the sidebar from the new file. Here are the steps to do this.

Before we go any further, you will have to be able to access your wordpress theme files, so basically this cannot be done on a shared wordpress site, such as wordpress.com or propblogs.com (I edit most of the themes on propblogs so you can choose page templates, so you do not need this tutorial if you use propblogs)

This is for a basic theme, some themes can get pretty tricky...if you can't figure it out, let me know. I can figure it out for you. 

You are most likely going to edit 2 files. The style.css and the page.php file. You do not need to know any PHP for this, and you can do all the edits with notepad. Do not use microsoft word, it will just mess everything up for you. If you plan to do more customization to the themes, I suggest getting a professional editor. I use Dreamweaver, but there are many others.

first, let's edit the page.php file and make a template so you can use it over and over.

This is the default page.php file

Pretty simple...remove all the code in the middle, and you just have get_header, get_sidebar, and get_footer. The content in the middle display your page content. Save page.php as page_no_sidebar.php and then update it to look like this

Notice I removed get_sidebar, and I added a comment to the top of the file. Wordpress scans all files in the theme folders and when it comes across a keyword like "Template Name" it knows what to do with it. Wordpress will add this file to the template dropdown box.


Now you will not see the sidebar, but in most cases the main body of content will still not extend all the way across the page. you now need to edit the style.css file to make the main body fill the page. Open style.css and look for this: #primary-content. You see primary content in the main div tag in the above code. When you find it, look to see if there is a width attribute. If there is and it is 100%, you might not need to edit anything. If it is something like 500px, it is probably too narrow to fill the entire page. copy the entire section

then paste it right below the section and rename it to:

Make the width around 900px-1000px...you will have to play with this to get it right. Of course there are ways to make it perfect, but the majority of themes will all be different and this is just a basic tutorial.
Another attribute to look for is a margin, or padding attribute. If you see margin-right:200px...you will probably also need to change that to 0px. Again, you will probably have to play with it.
now go back to page_no_sidebar.php and change the div tag with id='primary-content' to id='primary-content-full-page'

now upload all files to the server and you should be golden.

BTW, I hold no responsibility if you take my advice and it ruins your website

Tags:Blogging Software html PHP Realivent Updates wordpress wordpress themes

Popularity: 11% [?]

This is not just for wordpress, but for any website. This might be a little advanced for some people using wordpress, but you should be able to take my code and use it in your site without any problems.

On the more advanced side, this is a fix to the IE6 problem with z-index (layers). When I was making this header, I first start in Firefox, which is a big mistake, you should start in IE, because you will run into more problem with IE. With Firefox, I made this header in about 5 minutes. It worked fine using z-index, but then when I looked at it IE6, it looked awful. So I started to tweak it and tweak it, and TWEAK IT!...4 hours later I have a nice header that works in both Firefox, IE6, and IE7. When I was googling "IE6 z-index" I came across countless forum posts on this same problem. Bottom line, I don't use IE at all anymore, only for testing Firefox is the way to go.

Here is the code if you want to just get it and go. You also download an example using images:
download code: code.zip

When I say stylish header, I mean a header that stays centers when you resize the browser and has 2 background images or colors. If you look at our header, the left is mostly black and the right is gray with a fade. Main image is 980px wide, has a gray color on the right and a dark image on the left. The downloadable code has a background with brown on the left and black on the right, with a middle image that matches the 2 colors on each side.

My initial theory about how to create this header was to make two div's for the background of the header, both with a width of 50%, and then float the main image over then, centered to the screen using z-index. This create an expandable header image. It works great in Firefox, but not in IE6. After struggling, I finally figured out that it has nothing to do with z-index. It is all about positioning. I also found it was hard to put 2 div's together with a 50% width. If you look at the code above, I make a full width background div that holds the color for the right side of the main image. Inside that div, I make another div that is positioned to the left, and width of 50%. Now when I resize the browser, both sides of the main image will expand properly. Now I just have to put the main image over these 2 div's. You would think z-index would be the answer, but you really just need to make the main image's position relative to the main div container. It's probably easier to just look at the code to figure it out.

Good luck with your wordpress headers, and if there is an easier way to do this, let me know.

Tags:Blogging Software div style html images wordpress wordpress themes

Popularity: 11% [?]