Admin

Adding a Blog to your current real estate site

By
Services for Real Estate Pros with Gainesville Apartments by Trimark Properties

Hi everyone!

We're in the process of setting up a blog on another community (not on our site) and we want to add a blog to our current site. It's a real estate site focusing on apartments in gainesville, you can see the site here: http://www.trimarkproperties.com/ . We originally planned on just creating a blog freehand (ie: designing a web page that looked like a blog without a content management system) but since then, we've planned out who/how the blog will be updated, and the person who will be doing most of the writing isn't very technical. So now, we want to add a Blog to our website that has it's own content management system (something like Blogger or Wordpress etc).

Unfortuantely, I'm not sure how to do that. We've never actually added an exterior content management system to our site (we have a dynamic site but we run our own database and CMS system that we've developed, to control pricing and availability).

ActiveRain seems like a great place to ask these questions:
A) Do you have a blog on your site that you set up yourself (ie- did not give to an IT or web consultant to set up)?
B) Which system (Wordpress, Blogger, Eblogger, MovableType) are you using? Do you wish you had used another? Why?
C) How did you actually go about setting up the CMS to integrate into your own website?
D) Any recommendations about blogging on your own site vs blogging on a 3rd party site?

 Thanks everyone for the help! Please link to anything that would be helpful for me to read!
Aubrey

Jim Kimmons
San Leon, TX
Not a quick easy solution here.  Wordpress would be far and away your best choice for the blog.  Here's a tutorial on integrating it into an existing web site.  It might be faster to choose a host like Yahoo who has simple one-click wordpress integration.  You would then move the site and in fifteen minutes you could have the blog and all the power of wordpress free widgets and plugins.
May 15, 2007 01:23 AM
Greg Cremia
Shore Realty of the Outer Banks - Nags Head, NC
I am in the process of adding wordpress to my site. Everything went easy but it won't let me log in. These things take time.
May 15, 2007 01:44 AM
Anonymous
Jonathan Wold

If you're going the DIY route, in addition to my original tutorial (referenced by Jim - Thanks Jim! :) I'd suggest taking a look at a newer release for Wordpress 2.x which also covers Wordpress integration: How to Create a Wordpress Theme

Wordpress is an awesome platform to work with and I highly encourage you to keep at it :).

D) There are positives and negatives to both, but for the most part blogging on your own site far outshines the rest. An example of an exception would be a high ranking blog on a site like Wordpress.com - which would then bring in a hefty source of traffic. Otherwise, keeping it on your site gives you a lot more flexibility.

Keep up the good work!

-Jonathan

May 15, 2007 04:28 AM
#3