ABC's Extreme Makeover Home Edition and Hallmark Homes announced today the next deserving family to receive a new home. 

Hallmark Homes released the following information this morning on the HallmarkExtreme.com website: 

 

"Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" will rebuild the home of the Andy and Heather Cowan, factory workers who struggle to support their four children Ryan, 16, Trevor, 13, Mason, 8, and their daughter Kori, 12, who is battling a congenital blood disease.

At six-years-old, Kori Cowan was diagnosed with a congenital blood disease affecting her immune system. Kori has developed polyps in her nasal cavity and behind her eyes. She has already endured 17 operations as a result of these painful growths, which must be surgically removed. Doctors believe these polyps may be the result of environmental issues facing the family's home, including an extreme mold infestation. Ryan, Andy and Heather's oldest son, has also fallen ill and has gone to live with his biological father – tearing this close-knit family apart. 

Despite the daily struggles Kori faces, she has not let her disease slow her down. During one of her stays at the blood clinic, Kori was inspired by a little girl with whom she shared a room and....Read Full Story at HallmarkExtreme.com

 

URBaCS, a Central Indiana software development company, is assisting the build by managing the website, communicating with sponsors and volunteers via text messaging system, and coordinating the social media campaign. To learn more about how URBaCS can help your business with The Next Big Idea visit URBaCS.com 

This week we will turning our attention to on line directories. One of the better ( and FREE) ways to increase your results in search queries is to be listed on some of the top web directories. 

 

Google and Yahoo have the most well known. Bing.com's local listing center and BOTW Local (Best Of The Web) have created very good local directories.

 

Have you come across a really good local directory recently? We are especially interested in directories that are based around towns and cities.

 

We will be putting our results together in a 6 part post starting next week. If you have any feedback on your experiences using web directories let me know and I will include your information.  

This is the last post in a five post series about homebuilder online photo galleries. So far we've discussed the importance of online photo galleries, ways to build a good photo gallery, some simple ways to search optimize your photos so they can be found, and we have taken you outside your comfort zone by encouraging you to post more pictures than you may be comfortable putting online. In this post we'd like to show you a few good examples of builder photo galleries from around the web.

The majority of your customers will visit your website before they visit your model home. More and more of your customers are engaging in social media every day. And more of these users are taking and uploading photos (more than 1 billion are uploaded every month between Flickr and Facebook alone).

What does it all mean?

It means that we need to take advantage of every opportunity available to us to get our message in front of the buying public. A well optimized photo gallery is... Read full article

In this blog series we've outlined the growing importance of online photo galleries, how to build a good photo gallery, and some ways to get your pictures online using free photo sharing tools. In this post, we'd like to explain why you should upload more photos than you're probably comfortable sharing.

Notice: This article may conflict with traditional "Marketing Director" wisdom. Don'tblame them.

Go to any homebuilder photo gallery. My guess is you'll find between... Read full article

 

In the first article in this blog series we outlined the growing importance of photos to the online world. In the second post we showed you how to build a photo gallery that helps generate search traffic and spread your message virally. With today's message we'd like to help you get your photos online using some great free services.

There are literally thousands of online photo sharing websites on the net. We only talk about two in this post, Flickr and Facebook. You can.... Read full post 

This our second post about on line photo galleries. The emphasis of the series is how New Home builders can increase traffic to their website using photo galleries in a way completely contrary to the advise of their marketing department. Home Builder Galleries - The Right Way In the first article in our Homebuilder Photo Galleries blog series we showcased the explosion of online photos. In this post we'd like to outline how your photos should appear online. We'll be outlining best and worst practices that we've seen from homebuilders. Most builders already have a series of photos embedded on their website. Read the rest of the story here Stop back tomorrow for post 3. Where to post photos

Over the last two weeks we at URBaCS have been researching and writing about on line photo galleries. We wanted to look at how they can be used by new home builders to increase traffic to their website. We posted our results on the URBaCS Blog. Over the next five days I will be elaborating on what we have found and some of our feedback. 

 

Home Builder Photo Galleries -Intro to the blog series ( Post #1 of 5)

 

Homebuilder's aren't using photo galleries to their full capabilites so we'll be spending the next week discussing what builder's should be doing to use photos as a tool to drive search traffic and engage prospective home buyers. With today's down housing market we are all doing business differently than we did just a few short years ago.  Most of the old marketing stand-bys don't work like they used to, and we are all looking for new ways to make our marketing dollars stretch further. 

It's all about the numbers

Ask any new home sales professional or Realtor and they'll tell you it's always been about the numbers. X number of traffic units leads to Y number of sales. Click here to read the full post.

 

Stop back tomorrow for post 2.

I have been writing this year about new technology, the changes in our economy, and the effects on how we do business. Our friends at Google are always looking a few years into the future. Last week they introduced Google Wave.

Google Wave is the next evolution in the way we communicate. The developers took a look at how we communicate via the internet and decided traditional email wasn't up to today's speed, so they are breaking the old rules and developing a new way to communicate, "waves". Email, instant messages, photo sharing, scheduling, and more

 

I won't waste your time telling you about Wave, when the developers can do so better. Here is a link Wave to see a presentation from Google to a group of developers that explains it all.  It is a bit long and at times technical, but it is good information worth knowing. 

 

Communication is such an integral part of the housing industry. Our team at URBaCS has been working to stay at the cutting edge of new technology and find ways to adapt it to fit the needs of builders and Realtors. We will continue to bring you new information as we find it. To learn more about what we do, visit www.urbacs.com. To learn more about our products for builders, visit Builders, To learn more about our products for Realtors, visit Realtors 

Why don't builders make better use of photo galleries?

 

Each year Builder magazine does its top 100 list. Last week while going through the list, I visited the website of the top 15 builders. What I found, is that it is very hard to find a picture gallery of their homes. 

Over 78% of home buyers will visit a builders website before they visit the model home. We also know that the model home is one of the best selling tools in a builders arsenal. Make a quick visit to the Flickr or Picasa websites and you will see how popular posting photos on line has become. 

Some of the builders websites have nicly produced videos of a few of their homes. This is helpful, but still lacks the full benefit of a large photo gallery. There is something compelling about a "next" button that pushes us to click to see what the next picture is going to be. 

 

Here is an example of two photo galleries;

 

Centex photo gallery

Estridge photo gallery

Which of the two of these is more compelling as a sales tool? Centex has a nice slide show. No titles, descriptions or tags. Estridge has titles so buyers know which home they are looking at, tags so the pictures are easy to find by category, and descriptions so they increase page rankings by search engine's.  

 

The technology is available. Realtors have found the benefit of adding pictures to their listings. So I ask again... Why don't more builders make better use of photo galleries?

 

The winds of change are continuing to accelerate. The way we do business needs to change as well... if we are to keep up. 

 

This year is the year of the social networks. Twitter and Facebook seem to be the flavor of the day for now. How many of your co-workers have Facebook accounts? I guess the better question is to ask, how many of them don't? It was not too long ago that Facebook was only something that college kids were on. Now it has gone main stream. 

 

How about cell phones? I know many of you can recall the days before cell phones. Can you even imagine doing business without cell phones today? It would be imposable. Our clientele expect that we will be available for them at a moments notice. 

 

Text messaging is coming into it's own this year. This is partially do to the popularity of Twitter and similar applications. But it can also be attributed to  the maturing of the medium itself. This is the first year that the number of text messages will exceed the number of phone calls. More and more Realtors are finding ways to incorporate text based marketing into their marketing plan. 

 

So what is the next technology change? Photo Messaging

Many see the next change coming as digital images become more Mobil. Platforms like Fliker, Facebook and MySpace have trained us how to post pictures on-line for years. Cell phones are now equipped to take, view and send pictures far better than they could even as recently as 12 months ago. According to a recent survey by PMA Foresight;

• About one-fourth of all US mobile subscribers sent or received images or video through their cellphone.
• Photo/video sharing is the top multimedia activity on the cellphone in the USA, ahead of games, downloading of ringtones, applications, and more.
• Photo messaging activity is highest in the months of December and August. 
  
• Most notably, the 2008 M:Metrics survey recorded a 60 percent increase in the number of cellphone subscribers involved in photo messaging from the same survey period in 2007.
• Participation in photo messaging increased across all age groups, as well.