Moving A Site Along
Continuing efforts of pulling the curtain aside to look at the development of a real estate site.
I realized that I have not kept to my promise of detailing all of the developments of this site. When I began to look at how we use the internet and how a website can help fit into that use, I laid out plans for a direction of a local real estate nexus could be like. I am almost at that stage of opening the final elements. Here is where I am at:
Adsense/Google Search- this was fairly easy to set up. I like the fact that I can limit to sites that I trust. I am still in the process of populating the eligible sites. I think that this will give anyone searching for real estate information a better search experience. Once I become better at it, I think that I should go back to Zillow’s API to see what can be developed with it.
Photos- oh my unfortunate stepchild. I had not given this section of the site as much attention as I wanted. Today, I integrated the look and navigation with the rest of the site. I also worked at adding more pictures with descriptions. I think that I should set one day aside a month to gather collected shots, and work on improving the look of this section of the site. Hopefully, it really will become a visual library.
Home Listings with OpenRealty- I was not originally planning on having this open source program on this site, but I have been working with it these past few days, and I think that I will make this available to people who want to list their homes. About my experience loading it onto the site: the wiki for the instructions were good, and you need to make sure that you follow all of the steps. My one issue was setting permissions for files on my site. While using Filezilla, my FTP client, I right clicked on the file to find an option similar to the “properties” option when working with files on my computer. I mention this, because the setting of permissions stumped me for a moment. The only real problem that I had was when I attempted to go to the home page from the admin section. It was set to the “lazuli” template, and I obtained a T-string error in the first line. I cut the first line out of the “main.html” with my editor, notepad++, and uploaded it again. Problem solved. I am going with the “autumn candy” template, which I added my header and navigation buttons from the blog. This will be a great way for people to list their homes with good detail. Note: I have deleted this part of the site, because it was taking my focus away from helping readers in the best way that I can.
Updated Adwords- my AdWords campaign was for my fschulte-ladbeck.com site, so I changed it for this site. I am not sure why, but I never did move to the standard edition from the starter edition. This was pretty dumb on my part to wait so long. The cost to me does not need to be different, and there are so many more options of how to work with my campaign under the standard edition, which can be quite beneficial. Particularly the feature of connecting it with Analytics.
By next week, the listing option will be open for people to check out. I will have to see how I will promote it. It may mean some more work for me if I have real interest in this feature, but I want to leave it free to people. We will see how it goes.
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