Quite a few of the guys here are using our hosting service, so I thought I'd post this on Active Rain as well.

Visit our Home Inspector Website Hosting Website for more information on getting 3 Months FREE hosting.

We created a website hosting service for home inspectors after many inspectors came to us complaining that they could not edit their own websites without paying someone, or even if they could, they couldn't make the changes necessary to get their site to the top of the search engine rankings. With our new system you can do that and a lot more. We spent a lot of time working with a large group of inspectors to create a powerful, yet easy to use system.

Now, for the best part. We are so confident that you'll like the system that we are giving ALL home inspectors 3 MONTHS FREE to try out the service, no credit card required. After the 3 months the service will only be $24.99 a month (or $20 a month if you pay for a year). Many home inspectors are now choosing to have multiple websites as the more sites you can get to the first page of Google, the more jobs you'll get. Also, each site targets a certain geographical area. A few of our inspectors have 3 sites!

We currently have 25 themes from you to choose from, with more on the way. You can change your entire sites theme within seconds, on your own. To view all the current themes you can go to http://www.HomeInspectorPro.biz . Each theme can be customized with your own images. You will find a Theme selector on the left where you can flip through the different themes. We have many animated tutorials which you can get to from the left menu of our home page with more on the way. There are also multiple written tutorials up on the message boards.

To see some a few examples from our current users currently using the system check out http://www.sehomeinspection.com http://www.arrowepi.com http://www.daytonthermalinspection.com http://www.owlhomeinspection.com http://www.wisemanhomeinspections.com http://www.tennesseeinspector.net http://www.chicagohomeinspection.info . If you'd like to see more examples, you can visit the message boards on http://www.HomeInspectorPro.com where the bottom 3 boards are all about the website hosting service and many people have posted their sites. You should be familiar with the message boards anyways as a lot of discussion about Home Inspector Pro goes on there.

Current Features:

* Ability to add an unlimited number of pages to the site
* Edit your web pages whenever you want
* Make changes to all your keywords, descriptions, page titles that are necessary for good search engine rankings
* Change the page URL, also important for SEO (search engine optimization)
* Start up your own blog and allow users to comment on it, great to keep the search engines looking at your site
* Integrate news feeds from services to pull in fresh content daily (check out http://www.owlhomeinspections.com and look at the right side of any page but the first).
* Upload sample reports and other documents.
* Create Photo Galleries
* Create Slide shows ( check out http://www.sehomeinspection.com )
* Link directory system makes it easy to manage your links to other websites.
* Add your own forms and surveys. Get emailed the results and view them online.
* If you are doing pre-inspections/sellers inspections you can create real estate listings on your site and offer this as an extra incentive to your agents & clients.
* Certain portions of each theme are fixed, but you can add content & images all over the sides and often in the header of the site. In most (and eventually all) the themes you can replace the header and footer images as well with your own.
* Support through email, live chat on website and our message boards where our staff and other users will help you out.

Upcoming Features:

* If you use the Home Inspector Pro report upload service, we are planning on making it so clients and agents can get their reports through your site.
* A new service coming to the report uploads is the option to receive a credit card payment before a report is viewed.
* Accept credit card payments on your own site.
* Much, much more!

To get signed up, Click Here to fill out the form and start your FREE 3 months. If you don't have a domain name yet, don't worry, we'll help you out. Choosing a domain name is VERY important for good rankings, lets discuss what name you're about to choose before you get it.

Sincerely,

Dominic Maricic
President of Home Inspector Pro

I'm the main programmer and owner of Home Inspector Pro. You can check out our Home Inspection Software at  and a recent interview I did at http://www.NACHI.tv/episode8

We are always working hard at making our software easy to use, while creating a great looking report. I'd like to know what you wished the software you use right now had, and what are your favorite features? We put the same question out to our users a few months back but their viewpoint is obviously skewed since they use our software. The only way we're going to get better is from great input from inspectors like you. I realize that several of the programs out right now are great, and I have a good relationship with several of the owners. This isn't about creating a war about what's best, and if you don't want to tell us what you're using, that's fine, listing off the pro's & con's are enough.

Thanks for the help!

Sincerely,

Dominic Maricic
Home Inspector Pro
http://www.HomeInspectorPro.com
Toll Free: 1-888-750-4777 or 909-434-5031

Hi Guys,

We have a new version coming out of Home Inspector Pro next week and I wanted to show you some of the new features, and get your feedback.  What do you like about the report? What would you like to see?

One of the upcoming features is the bookmarks added to the left of the report shown when you open up the report. These will not actually print on the report, and are purely to make it easier to navigate the report. It was added after a suggestion by Steven Turetsky who wanted better navigation. Steven, now you won't even need to scroll to the top of the page to click on the 'tabs' that another program uses. You can click on the bookmarks no matter where you are. I'm still working on getting the summary listed on the bookmarks. 

Another feature added is not visible on the report, it's a bulk photo add button. With one click you can add all the photos in a folder to the report. Then you can easily remove the few photos you might now want. Adding 100 photos took about 30 seconds, setting them to the sections they belong to is extremely quick as well.

One thing not on this report that will be done by next week is the ability to change the font size, type & color of the section headings (bathroom, bedroom, etc). This has been requested by quite a few of our users such as Bob Elliot.

You can view the report by clicking here: Home Inspection Report Sample 

Hopefully it is ok that I post this here. If not, let me know! 

I had a great week last week. I flew up to Colorado on Thursday and attended the Southern Colorado NACHI meeting in Colorado Springs which featured a bunch of great guys. Almost every home inspection program in existence was represented but an inspector at the meeting and it was great to hear what each person thought the pro's and con's of their software was. I also spent quite a bit of time showing the inspectors search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to improve their search engine rankings.

On Friday I drove up to Boulder, Colorado and met with Nick Gromicko, the founder of NACHI. We filmed a piece on Home Inspector Pro, the home inspection software that I'm the main programmer for. You can view it here: http://www.NACHI.TV , it's Episode 8. Nick's a great guy, with a great personality. He definitely is out to help out his members. He's also got two smart and good looking women working for him. Paige worked the cameras and sometimes is the host. Valerie worked the cameras and also did the video editing for the film.

Then I drove back down to Colorado Springs to watch my brothers Ice Hockey team play against Colorado College. He is the goalie (Nick Maricic) for the Team USA Under 18 Ice Hockey team. You can see more info on the team at http://www.USAHockey.com . They lost by one but for a team of 17 year old playing against one of the top Division 1 schools in the country (full of 20-24 year olds), they did great. Saturday night they played again the Air Force and lost by one again. Next weekend they play the University of Minnesota which is ranked #3 in the nation and then they fly to Switzerland to play in a 4 nation tournament.

Colorado is a beautiful state. The trees were all yellow and green, everyone was extremely nice. And everywhere we went someone made sure to update us on the Rockies score :) We went and looked at houses on Sunday. A brand new 3000 square foot house went for about $300,000. You can't even get a condo for that price here in California!

You can view more on our program at http://www.HomeInspectorPro.com

Dominic Maricic
Home Inspector Pro
Dominic@HomeInspectorPro.com
1-888-750-4777
MSN: Support@HomeInspectorPro.com
AIM: DMaricic
YIM: DCMEagle
ICQ: 513303
Google Talk: Dominic@HomeInspectorPro.com

We released version 2.5 of Home Inspector Pro for Windows today, and it has lots of exciting new features! The 2.5 version for Mac should be out by Monday (or sooner). To download the latest version visit http://www.HomeInspectorPro.com and log in on the left hand side if are already a user, or click on Download Trial if you'd like to try the program out.

Check out our video interview with NACHI Founder Nick Gromicko and myself on NACHI.TV!! Visit http://www.NACHI.TV and view Episode 8.

There are now 12 animated tutorials on the website. A few of them will be updated in the next few days to reflect the new updates.

Here's a list of the new features added for 2.5 and the last few versions in case you haven't updated in awhile. If you have any questions please let us know via email, phone, or live chat.

If you are already running Home Inspector Pro version 2.0-2.4.9 select the Update version. If you are installing Home Inspector Pro on a new machines or need to do a complete reinstall use the full version. IMPORTANT: IF YOU UNINSTALL THE PROGRAM IT WILL DELETE ALL YOUR TEMPLATES AND FILES!! MAKE SURE TO BACKUP FIRST! You can just install the update (or even full version) over the existing and you won't lose your work.

If you have any questions or problems with this version please email support@homeinspectorpro.com or use the Live Help feature. To install simply download the version you need and run the installer.

What was added in 2.5

• Pictures can now be added anywhere in the report, not just at the end! Use the drop down boxes above each picture to control where they will appear in the report. You can check a box next to the picture if you want the picture to still appear at the end. This creates a much better looking report and is extremely fast.
  
• There is a caption field under each picture. You can type in a caption or you can check the box to use the drop down box (section names) as the caption like before.
• The border, header and font colors chosen from Report Settings->Formatting now just apply to the cover page, summary page, end of the report photos and earthquake page (if you use it).
• You can go to Report Settings -> Section Colors and Print Order to select the colors for individual sections, you can set them all the same, or all different.
• Reordering and excluding sections on the report was relocated to Report Settings-> Section Colors and Print Order.
• Border thickness can now be adjusted from 0 to 20 pixes allowing a greater control of appearance. Set it at Report Settings -> Section Colors.
• Programs starts up 50-60% faster.
• Reports are created 50-60% faster.
• Several other smaller features.
  

What was added in 2.4.5-2.4.7

• Load time of the program and ram usage was decreased by optimizing the Edit Table panels.
• Weather & Time fields added to the Client Info. Both fields are optional.
• Changes made to the Photo Panels to allow for much larger images to be loaded
• Report Settings->Options was added with lots of new features. These will probably be reorganized at a later date but we wanted to get the functionality in place.
• Ability to print pages continuously rather than giving each section its own page.
• Ability to print the item description (Comments, Materials, etc) even if no items have been selected.
• Ability to not print an item if no comments have been made.
• Ability to use roman numerals rather than numbers to label areas on the report.
• Ability to use letters rather than numbers to label each item on the report.
• Ability to print the summary at the end of the report instead of after the cover page.
• Ability to change the title of the summary page.
• The documents section no longer prints the file name at the top of the page. We decided it made more sense to allow the user to enter the document name at the top of the document for more flexability.
• By using Report Settings -> Ratings if you do not use all the ratings the extra boxes will not print on the report or show up in the program.
• Items such as Cabinets, Walls, tabs can now be renamed (the items within them still cannot, will be added in the future).
• Bug fixes were made to ensure that new areas could be added in the Edit Template section and renamed without problems.
• Several other bug fixes were made.

For those of you who are a bit behind, What was added in 2.4.0

• Documents - You now have the ability to add an unlimited number of documents into your report. These documents and be added after any section or after the cover page. You can reach this area by clicking on the Documents button. All documents are stored in the Data\Documents folder and can be moved from computer to computer. Although you can use the document in multiple templates, the location of where the documents will print is template specific. This means you must click Save Template to save this info.
• Separators - In order to allow more narrative reports and flexability a separator option has been added to each table. To view this setting click on the Edit Tables button. Next to each table you have the option of the items you choose for each section to be comma separated (the default), period separated, or separated by a new line. This greatly approves the attractiveness of the report when you use longer descriptions of problems.
• Logo - You can now add your company logo to the cover page. This is under Edit->Report Settings->Company Logo.