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Part 2: The Anatomy of a Perfect Real Estate WordPress Blog - Functionality and Usability

In this multi-part series, we examine The Coral Gables Story, a real estate blog by Papillon Real Estate in Coral Gables, FL

We talked about the Janie's and Shelly's development process from Concept through Context to Vision, Graphics design and Branding, earlier.

If you missed Part 1, you can read it here 

 

Functional design, Features and Usability

The Coral Gables Story is a very functional blog. When I say functional, I mean it provides a lot of things besides just articles of regular posts. While the core of the blog is the actual content that it delivers, Janie and Shelly implemented many ways to provide functionality besides the content.

But first things first: Janie and Shelly are in the business of selling real estate. The ultimate measurement of all of their efforts is the gain they achieve in their real estate business with this blog. As you will see, according to their vision and within the overall context of the site, real estate is interwoven via different features. 

Real estate search at the visitors' fingertips

This is a great functional design example: The Coral Gables Story provides regular real estate services (home search, featured listings, market reports), just like any other blog or real estate website would do. But they do it both in a straight forward, call-for-action way (main header, top right sidebar) and also implicitly, in the context of the post. Their system is set up in a way, that the RealBird Map-based Search engine (shameless plug:) is embedded in the footer of each of the geo-tagged posts, providing a non-intrusive real estate search engine at the bottom of each article, with instant results, in the context of the location.

Explicit placement of real estate services "above the fold"

This is fairly straightforward: The main, top horizontal navigation area contains the usual real estate items: Featured Listings and Home Search. Furthermore, the top right sidebar also contains a large, visible call-for-action button called "Search For Homes". These are functional design elements consistently placed on all the blog posts and most of the static pages. 

When designing the blog, it is very important to know the difference between graphics design and functional design. Actually it's less of a difference and more of a transition: the projection of graphics design into functional design. A blog is an interactive software application after all as opposed to a brochure or a street sign. One of the main considerations is the placement of critical elements on the user interface. Functional elements that should be in front of the user all the time have to be placed:

• Above the fold: I.e. viewable and usable without scrolling in the browser
• Should follow user behavior studies that show where people tend to look and click on a webpage. 

The best place to learn about this is from Google. Google has a set of guidelines for publishers about recommended ad placements. We can trust Google's research on this: their interest is to generate as much ad clicks as possible via their AdSense Publisher network, so they did their homework. I definitely trust their results

• Where should I put important functional elements on my pages? See Where should I place Google ads on my pages?
• Where should I put important functional elements on my posts? See Blogtimize - Optimize the ads on your blog

While these heat maps talk about ad placement, most of the information is applicable for the placements of important, functional elements. Janie and Shelly did a great job with placing the important real estate links correctly on their blog's homepage and static pages. Read on, it's getting exciting now...

Implicit placement of real estate services in blog posts' footers

This is where it gets exciting. Again, referring back to Google's ad placement heatmaps, one of the most viewed and clicked areas of a blog post is right after the post. The reason for this is the following: While on regular websites and webpages, users scan for information to click and view usually above the fold, on a blog post their intention is different. They arrived via RSS or organic search or social media shares and they know what they want and that is, reading the post first and foremost, they usually don't care about main navigation, headers, sidebars. But once they are done with reading the info and assuming that the author won their heart with the content, they will want to do more. They are most likely scrolled down to the bottom of the post and they are now scanning that portion of the page, it's no longer "above the fold" that matters, it's the blog post footer area that is the HOTTEST location. Once again, here is Google's heatmap for a blog layout. So the important thing to note here is that you place functional elements differently on homepages and static pages vs. blog posts.

Janie and Shelly have something really unique in this regard. Something that I have not seen on any other real estate blogs. Blog posts that are geocoded have a live RealBird Map-based Search embedded in the hottest footer area. This is an implicit, soft way to brand yourself as a real estate professional and to provide contextual, instant real estate search in the post itself.

See for example this post: Did LeBron do it in Coral Gables with a Candlestick? This is a post about a celebrity topic so visitors are less likely to be active home buyers, but nevertheless the embedded map-based search in the footer instantly provides a nearby homes for sale tool. And since the area that the post is about is a high end luxury market, of course, the homes listed are luxury properties too. Perfect contextual match. Just imagine the revenue if one of the many visitors over the years is in the market for luxury properties and find Janie and Shelly via this post. Statistically speaking, the placement of this contextual real estate service might make the difference between actual business and no conversion. Of course, the same is applicable to geocoded posts that are targeting the actual home buyer demographics, market report posts like this

Community pages and driving users toward actions

Both on the homepage and on the sidebar of the inner pages and posts, there is a very unique visual slider that categorizes the main niches that Janie and Shelly focus on. In fact, this is part of their core navigation structure and on every page they drive visitors toward these special pages that aggregate related posts that are classified by topics, provide live search engines, community information including school widgets, photo galleries, live twitter update widgets and more. These pages are hubs and they provide help for search engines to understand their site's structure better and also for users to get directions while navigating the site. It is a very unique and powerful approach. See for example the Historic Homes in Coral Gables community page. 

Deep social media integration and drive for engagement

One of their core marketing channels is social media. Janie is also an active guest author on AgentGenius and an expert on how to utilize social networking and geography tools, so it's only natural that they integrated many social media tools, including prominent sharing tools (both at the top and at the bottom of a post !), custom Facebook Pages for special niches (e.g. the Historic Homes section) and highlighted links to their social media. They understood that they might find themselves engaging people on different platforms and via different niches and as long as there is a unified way to manage communication, it is OK if a visitor becomes a Twitter follower rather than a regular blog reader for example or a fan of the Historic Homes Facebook Page versus The Coral Gables Facebook Page They provide many ways for people to stay in touch. Providing options can satisfy a larger group of people who have different online behaviors. I like it a lot how fluidly they move "attention" between the many platforms that they operate. 

There are many other features on their blog that encourage engagement. They use IntenseDebate for their commenting system, which allows people to login for commenting with their preferred network credentials (Facebook, Twitter etc.), it can autoshare comments to Twitter and Facebook to generate return traffic and it is extended with CommentLuv plugin, which allows commenters to add a link to their own blog below their comment. This is a dofollow link and while theoretically, it can "leak" PageRank from your post, the upside of motivating visitors to comment with "link love" is way higher than the insignificant "leak" an extra outgoing link on the page might mean.

Another interesting plugin used by The Coral Gables Story is "What Would Seth Godin Do". It adds another small module at the bottom of your post (see above why this is a hot area on the blog design). You can configure it to differentiate between new visitors and returning visitors and show them different messages accordingly. It's another great, soft way to develop different funnels and encourage engagement based on visitor segmentation.

SEO

The site is out for only two weeks and over a hundred distinct pages are indexed by Google already and actual visitors are clicking through via very strong search keywords such as "potamkin home in coral gables" or "LeBron James buys house in gables estates" or "George Merrick's french villages". These are really high-profile, targeted, highly competitive keywords. This is due to the following reasons (among others):

• Search engine optimized Wordpress platform
• Using Thesis, a highly search engine optimized theme for Wordpress. Used by Google's very own Matt Cutts
• The abundance of content available already at launch
• Well structured blog architecture
• The utilization of must-have SEO tools and plugins including backlink-building, Google Webmasters tools, Google XML Sitemaps plugin, Feedburner RSS implementation with pinging and Janie's diligent social media marketing utilizing her many channels to get the word out. 

Usability

This is a tricky one. Before launch, they decided to exclude some features from the blog for various reasons. With each feature, they considered the benefit a particular one brings in vs. the usability sacrifice. Some features may look useful at first, but it turns out to be confusing or hard to use. Others may be very valuable, but slow down the blog, hence ruining the user experience. For example, originally they had the Meebo bar plugin installed, which is a nice plugin to encourage sharing and collaboration on the blog, but it made the blog perform sluggish. Finally it was excluded to guarantee fast blog performance during the launch. It's a case-by-case decision to make, but a very important one. Also, a caching plugin is highly recommended. It can speed up the blog by several factors. See for example the WP-Super cache plugin If installed correctly, it makes a huge difference.

Actionable things that can be learned from this:

• Blog architecture matters: One can go further than "just" a stream of posts. If it's possible (budget, expertise etc.) try to set up the blog to be more than just a blog, provide call-for-action buttons with landing pages and design the homepage differently than the blog post layouts.
• Search engine optimization matters: Many people skip simple, but time consuming tasks, such as building backlinks from already existing platforms. You'll be surprised how many pages are out there where you can add your new blog Url to. Adding to the sidebar of your ActiveRain blog will create a backlink from all your current and future blog posts. Don't forget your outside blog or your RealBird account settings and even those places like Twitter, that will add nofollow to your links. Some people will still click on those links and may end up sharing your content or interacting with your blog. Create a document and start collecting all the possible places and 3rd party domains that are in your control, those that you can use for backlinking. You'll be surprised to see how many you have. 
• Usability matters: This sounds easy to understand, but harder to execute. People tend to overdo functionality and sacrifice usability, speed being the most important of them all. No matter how much traffic you get, if the site is slow or unintuitive, you will lose those visitors faster than you got them. 

Now onto some Wordpress customization goodness

As promised here are the details about the automatic inclusion of the RealBird Map-based Search into posts' footers. Please note that it requires two components. One of them is very easy to install and is a standard Wordpress plugin called GeoPress, the other one is an advanced customization of the Thesis theme. Depending on which theme you use for Wordpress, it may require different steps to achieve this functionality.

We are getting a bit technical here, so if you are unsure, please ask your WordPress blog provider or webmaster to do it for you.  

Step 1 - GeoPress plugin

Download the GeoPress plugin from WordPress

With GeoPress you can add geographic tags to your posts and pages. You can enter an address, points on a map, or the latitude & longitude on the post editor interface. The plugin also turns your blog RSS feed into a GeoRSS feed. GeoRSS includes the location information that helps 3rd party systems and aggregators to exactly identify the post's location, rather than parsing and guessing. For example, if you write about an event at a venue or the market stats of a sub divison, you can add the exact location of the place to your post with this plugin and with a few clicks. After setup, you will be to geocode and save a location with your post. The Wordpress editor will be extended with a new panel as shown below. Just enter the location, click "Map Location" and Save the post as usual.

 

The GeoPress plugin has a lot of cool feature: It will turn your regular RSS feed into a GeoRSS and also adds the coordinates to the post meta information. This is the location info we are going to use for auto-embedding the RealBird Map Search into the post footer.

Step 2 - Configuring Thesis to add the RealBird Map-based Search

The Thesis theme provides a custom_functions.php file in the /custom folder under the theme's root directory. Modifying that file is the proper way to add additional functionalities to your Wordpress blog. If you use other themes, please refer to that theme's documentation to see how this can be done.

While editing this post, I realized that the customization needed for this step is a pretty heavy software code and since there is no way we can support all the different WordPress installations out there, it's better to exclude the actual code for now. Having that said, if you want to know the details and are comfortable with manual customization of your theme, please email us at info@realbird.com or via ActiveRain and we will send you the code sample. Please note that this feature requires a RealBird PRO subscription. Also if you are a WordPress provider for real estate professionals, we are happy to share it with you as well. Finally, we are working on a WordPress plugin that will hide the complexities and we will have a follow up post about that, once it is released.

Here is a screenshot and link to see it in action. This live property search map is provided after the post content of "Historic Coral Rock Home Ready to Renovate – Ingraham Highway":

 

List of plugins and tools that were mentioned in this post

1. WP Super Cache Plugin
2. What Would Seth Godin Do Plugin
3. Google XML Sitemaps Plugin
4. IntenseDebate
5. CommentLuv
6. GeoPress Plugin
7. Thesis Theme
8. Google Webmaster Tools
9. Feedburner
10. RealBird Map-based Search 

I hope you found some new information in this two-part series (Part 1), something that you can apply to your own real estate blog as well.

Please do us a favor and in exchange for Janie and Shelly letting us disclose the details of their site, send some Facebook love their way.
Just click the *Like* button below to share The Coral Gables Story with your friends.

 

Thanks for reading.

-- Zoltan 
RealBird.com

 

 

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The Anatomy of a Perfect Real Estate Wordpress Blog - Part 1

Before we get started, let me disclose that I am biased: I worked with Janie and Shelly on The Coral Gables Story - in a personal role, not in my role at RealBird - but nevertheless, I truly believe that their recently released site is one of the best real estate blogs out there. After my analyses in Part 2 of this two parts series - with Janie's and Shelly's permission - I am going to share some powerful WordPress customization tips. Stay tuned via our RSS feed Part 2 wil follow in a few days. 

Concept, context and the vision

The Coral Gables Story is a real estate blog: their primary goal is to generate revenue from real estate sales activities, but they also wanted to create a site that goes beyond "just" real estate content and engages the community on a longer term, not just while people actively seeking a home to buy or planning to sell. The site is very much location centric, just like real estate itself, but it creates a mix of content that ventures out to other areas, more specifically, content about things that are the other passions of Janie and Shelly: history, coffee and social activities (e.g. local events). Working with them, I know for sure, that they started the whole development process by first identifying and refining their concept, their content mix and the overall vision. The whole Story concept is very innovative, social and inviting. They actively seek stories from local businesses, residents and visitors to their city and they launched with a few stories already posted. Here is an example post: Memories of Family Vacations from DE that brought a Family to Coral Gables

What's important to emphasize here is that the concept and the context that glues these different topics together clearly defines the vision. Once defined, the vision made them focused during the whole process and importantly, it is instantly clear for the blog visitors as well. They also posted this featured article ( Just what is The Coral Gables Story all about? ) that clearly communicates the concept and the vision to first time visitors.

Actionable things that can be learned here:

• Define your concept, context and the vision - it will keep you focused for the long run
• Create a content mix documentation  - find the verticals and niches that are your passions besides real estate, write them down in a spreadsheet and try to come up with the percentage of content each niche will generate. You should be able to generate a pie chart of your content mix. Again, this will keep you on track for the long run. It does not have to be complicated, in the case of The Coral Gables Story, a list of main categories such as "Real estate", "Coffee", "History", "Events", "Your Story" did the magic. Once documented, it could be easily decided how much content for each category they wanted to and can actually create ongoing.
• Iterate until the concept and content mix is in the perfect context of your overall goal: i.e. to generate real estate business

Design, branding and execution

Because I was involved from inception through launch, I know it for a fact, that the design went through many iterations. Janie and Shelly had a vision from the beginning and the functional design and the graphics design went hand-in-hand to create the final product.

In March, the site was almost ready to launch, but after some internal debates about the colors and typography and based on the feedback from others, they decided to go through one more large iteration and they changed the overall color theme and design elements, once again. It was a big decision, because they've already invested months of work in the first design, but for the very same reason - due to all the investment in time - they wanted to make it right at the launch.

Their vision also suggested that they need an overall design that is brand-able and functional. One that they can use as an overall branding vehicle on business stationaries, T-shirts, merchandise etc. and one that supports online applications as well including online marketing such as SEO, social media marketing etc.

After all the efforts, they got it right. Here is what I like the most:

• Overall color theme - solid, easy on the eye, unique overall design (brown and green) and the colorful thumbnails and featured posts add enough spice to keep it exciting on subsequent visits
• Highly emphasized call-for-action buttons - great functional design example. It's above the fold and drives visitors toward valuable actions 
• Homepage layout: I love that the large photo slider of their niche communities and real estate verticals are highlighted for new visitors. Many new visitors arrive to the homepage first or if not, check it out at least once during their visit. It's crucial to have a homepage that makes the vision obvious and intuitive. On the other hand, visitors through search engines and returning visitors via RSS will end up on the individual posts. The website is designed in a way that it provides slightly different landing page, content for new vs. returning visitors. Very smart design for maximizing the engagement

Actionable things that can be learned here:

• Understand the many faces of design:  graphics design, functional design and branding. Make sure they work together well and support each other
• Take your time: Design, branding and proper execution takes time and many iterations. 
• Hire a designer: Creative process is a very subjective matter, but then there are many objective things involved. Professionals know typography, colors, layouts and what's doable and what's not to tie graphics, functionality and brand together.
• Get feedback from peers and different people around you.You don't have to change your idea to accomodate every bit of feedback but you may get inspired by outsiders.

Janie's and Shelly's diligence in design, execution and attention to details paid off. Thesis theme founder Chris Pearson found their blog on his own and tweeted about it to his 9000+ followers. See the screenshot of his status update below.

Pretty neat, isn't it?

UP NEXT: Features and usability and hands-on technical tricks and tips in Part 2

I wanted to keep this post reasonably short. In Part 2, I will explore the Features and Usability aspect of The Coral Gables Story and will also provide hands-on, technical details about some of the Wordpress plugins that Janie and Shelly used and also details about the RealBird integrations.

If you like what you've seen so far, just click the *Like* button below and let them know

Stay tuned for Part 2. Thanks !

-- Zoltan 
RealBird.com

 

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Don't Forget to Like Yourself - Facebook Listing Pages with RealBird

Once upon a time there were print real estate advertisements only, newspapers, flyers and so on. Then the MLS computer systems came along with sharing listing information among real estate members. In the early 2000s, IDX was the next big thing with letting the listing information reach the public through other brokers' and agents' websites, providing additional exposure to properties by aggregating home buyer traffic on 3rd party websites. Listing syndication, single property websites with SEO and listing widgets followed and property information reached new destinations - places where home buyers were gathering and searching on: classified sites, Google and other search engines and blogs.

And now we have something new and fresh and powerful emerging from the horizon ! Ready?

Introducing the Facebook Listing Pages for your RealBird Single Property Websites

Facebook recently launched their new Facebook Platform including the "Like" button for the web. The "Like" button is a small widget that website and blog owners can add to their sites. Visitors with a Facebook account (~400 million of them) can like and recommend the content on their network. However, most implementations are "simple" sharing solutions only and do not utilize the full Facebook Open Graph platform.

The RealBird solution that we released last Friday takes this concept one step further. It is a full Facebook Open Graph implementation. Best of all, it's really, really simple for both you and your users. 

How does it work?

The Facebook Open Graph platform enables real world objects (people, books, landmarks, places, products etc.) that are presented on the Web to become part of the Facebook social graph. At its basic level, the social graph is the set of 1) nodes or objects (You, a landmark, a place, a business, a real estate listing) and 2) their relationships or connections (connection between You and your friends, You and a business, You and a real estate listing etc.). Messages such as status updates travel between the 1) nodes via these 2) connections.

The RealBird implementation of the Facebook Open Graph platform enables you, the RealBird member to create a Facebook Listing Page attached to the social graph. With a single click, you can create a Facebook Listing Page for your RealBird single property website and invite friends, sellers and potential buyers to create a connection between their Facebook account and your listing by clicking the "Like" button themselves. Once they do, they establish a relationship to your Facebook Listing Page. All the status updates that you post on these Facebook Listing Pages in the future will show up in those people's News Feed who liked your property.

Sounds complicated? It's not ! 

Below are the simple steps you have to do to enable this feature on your RealBird account and to create a Facebook Listing Page for your listing. Takes literally less then a minute. 

1. Login to RealBird or register here for free (free for up to 2 listings and only $99/year for unlimited listings). 
2. Connect your Facebook account with RealBird (takes only 5 seconds)
3. Visit your own RealBird single property websites and click "Like" (takes 1 second)
4. An "Admin Page" link will appear next to the Like widget at the footer area of your RealBird website, above the translation tools. Clicking that will take you to the automatically created Facebook Listing Page. It is also auto-populated with your main property photo, listing info and link to your property website on RealBird

That's it. It is this simple. From here on, you will be able to manage your Facebook Listing Page just like any other Facebook Pages and post updates, such as price reductions, new photos, open home dates etc. and every Facebook user who liked your property will be automatically notified about these events. 

Connecting your Facebook account to RealBird  (it's secure, we do not see your Facebook credentials)

"Like" your RealBird property website

There is a small "Like" button above the fold, on the top of your RealBird property websites and a full "Like" widget at the bottom. The bottom one also has an "Admin Page" link as shown below (assuming you connected Facebook to RealBird in Step 1). The Admin Page link is only visible for you, the listing website owner.

Listing courtesy of Mike Conner of City Realty inc in Olympia, WA

Manage your status updates via the Facebook Listing Page 

The arrows show the auto-populated photos, description, the status update entries and Facebook Page tabs.

 

How to build a fan base for your listing?

The most important step is to invite your seller, the current owner of the property, and ask him/her to "Like" your RealBird listing website. When they do, their Facebook friends will be notified via their News Feed. You may also want to aks the seller to invite their own friends and family to "Like" the property, and when those people do, all the friends of the friend of the seller will be notified as well. The more people like the property, the more of them will be notified via their News Feed, and the more likely it will be that your Facebook Listing Page becomes a viral marketing hub.

What updates should I post on the Facebook Listing Pages?

Pretty much anything that is relevant to the sales cycle. For example:

• Price reductions
• Open home dates
• New pictures
• Neighborhood events and info

Only the imagination is the limit. Just make sure, that it's related to the property in some ways. And just like with any other Facebook Page, make sure that you are approachable, that you include some call for actions every now and then and also make sure that you do not overload your "fans" with too frequent updates. Probably one update per day is enough, in most cases it will be even less.

If you are not a RealBird member yet, you can register here for free (free for up to 2 listings and only $99/year for unlimited listing marketing). Otherwise just login to RealBird and follow the simple steps above to get started.

Happy social media marketing !

Should you have question, please do not hesitate to contact us.

-- Zoltan 
 RealBird.com

 

 

 

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