Technology Archives

Thursday, March 24, 2016 In Business, Productivity, Real Estate Websites, Social Media, Technology, WordPress

How we feel about Facebook Instant Articles

By now you’ve probably already heard about Facebook instant articles. This isn’t merely another Facebook update, it marks a shift in the use of social media and makes the consumption of content more efficient. The social media giant has been working on it’s instant article feature for months and is finally ready to launch! Facebook instant articles will not only affect the way you interact with content on your personal Facebook feed but also how your audience will interact and be exposed to the content you create and post on your Facebook business pages. The good news is that WordPress’ got your back. Facebook partnered up with Automattic, a WordPress parent company, to create a FREE plugin that enables instant articles. Needless to say, we’re fans.

So what are Facebook Instant Articles?

Starting April 12th Facebook has enabled the ability for publishers and business content creators to post whole articles on Facebook. This makes it easier for users to consume content without having to leave Facebook.
Whether it’s through your personal timeline, or business page, viewers will have the ability read full articles without being directed to an external site. Say you repost an article you found on http://mashable.com/, people will be able to read the entire article directly on you page.
71% of Millennials navigate the web through mobile devices. While getting redirect might not seem so hectic on desktop, on mobile it can be more impractical. Facebook instant articles makes it easy to browser through a plethora of information all in one place.

How this new feature empowers Facebook… even more

It’s an overall win for the social media giant of course, instant articles will prolong visitor sessions. Ultimately Facebook’s goal of keeping users on their website for countless hours is not only feasible but could quite possible bring Facebook in the forefront of it’s biggest competitor, Google.

Facebook Instant Articles and content creators

The introduction of Facebook instant articles might seem a bit risky for publishers and bloggers at first glance. When users consume all content through Facebook, traffic to your website could decrease. But hey they have all the power. There is a trade-off however, if you make good use of instant articles your content will be get much more organic traction and reach on Facebook itself.
If you’re not blogging you should start. Get your content out there and increase your Facebook visibility.

Why You’re in great hands with WordPress

If you’re website runs on WordPress than you have an instant advantage. Facebook and WordPress’ partner Automattic have collaborated to create a free WordPress plugin that will automatically post your blogs as instant articles on Facebook.

With so many algorithmic modifications, it’s hard to keep up but important to embrace and accept them nonetheless. What might have been best practice yesterday could not work for you tomorrow. But we’ll do our best to keep you in the know. So set a reminder for April 12th and be one of the first to try the WordPress plugin for instant articles! We’d love to hear your thoughts on it!

Friday, October 23, 2015 In Real Estate Websites, Technology, Templates, Upgrades, WordPress

New WordPress Website Theme – Introducing Anon

For a long time now, we have been wanting to create a product that would not only render top quality websites for our clients, but also have the capacity to do so without excessive third-party involvement. We want our clients to feel empowered and capable of running their own Real Estate website on a site that is both stylish and user friendly. How were we going to do this? We summoned all our resources, put on our sweatpants, ordered copious amounts of takeout and sat down behind our monitors (as tech nerds tend to do) and worked on bringing you this brand new, state of the art WordPress template for Real Estate professionals – Anon.

How is this template different you ask?

1. It’s made up of a parent template Anon and 4 child templates:

Brio
Calm
Diverse
Exquisite

2. Both the parent template and all child templates are customizable, allowing for personal branding. In fact, we highly encourage getting creative!

3. It’s responsive! Seamlessly adjusts to the size of any device it’s being viewed on. That includes desktop, laptop, iPad and mobile. There is also a mobile version of the website that has location-based listing mapping technology. Your clients can visit your website wherever they are and view listings in the area.

4. The content editor is embedded directly onto the site which facilitates the editing process and allows you to view changes as you make them.

5. The template includes an array of plug-ins and features that have been thoughtfully placed for optimum use. This includes an end-to-end rotating banner with full-screen images and an integrated search bar. We recommend using high resolution stock photos to add visual impact value to your site. Here are some helpful resources:

Key Features:

Agent or team image section with introduction. Do you have a recent team photo or headshot? Introduce yourself here and link it to the about me page.
Neatly laid out call-to-action buttons. How do you want your visitors to interact with your content? Direct them to lead capturing forms or custom pages by adding links.
Featured Listings widget, allows you hand pick listings you want to showcase on your homepage and encourage your clients to navigate through all the listings on your site.
Testimonials section: You’ve work hard and you earned bragging rights, flaunt what your happy clients have to say about you.

We are proud to make this possible for our current and future clients. The best part? There’s more to come, this templates is the first pillar of a series of cutting edge products and services that we are working on. To find out how you can start using this template for your business today please let us know here.

Thursday, August 20, 2015 In Real Estate Websites, SEO, Social Media, Technology, Templates, Upgrades

Best Realtor® resources for your NEW ClickSold Website

So you’ve just finished setting up your first ClickSold website and wonder what else you can do with it? Here are some resources to reap the benefits of your ClickSold site.

Plugins

Contact Form 7

Have you always wanted a contact form on your site that you want potential home buyers or home sellers contact you with? Contact Form 7 is a fully customizable contact form plug-in that allows just that! Best paired up with the Configure SMTP plug-in to configure your SMTP settings or send through Gmail.

WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache is a static caching plug-in that generates HTML. This helps your site load faster as it stores a light memory in your browser. After an HTML file is generated on your ClickSold site the webserver will override the HTML file rather than processing the heavier and bandwidth costing WordPress PHP Scripts.

Visual Composer

This is probably our favorite plug-in yet, If you’re a visual person who has to edit some content on your ClickSold site, this plug-in enables you to edit your content in place.

Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is the most complete WordPress Search Engine Optimization plugin that exists today for WordPress.org users. It incorporates everything from a Google search preview and in-page analysis that helps you optimize your pages content, images titles, meta descriptions and submit XML sitemaps. It helps you to write better content with the built-in content analysis function, and easily optimize your site’s titles and descriptions for Google.

Themes

I’m not sure how you can’t be happy with our theme selection but just in case here are some sites where you can purchase more themes.

http://themeforest.net/

https://creativemarket.com/

Friday, May 4, 2012 In Technology

ClickSold Feature – Content Scheduling

Guess what? Right now I’m sleeping. That’s right. I wrote this article a few days ago and scheduled it to be published today. You can do the same. Here’s how:

1. Write an article

Write your blog post.

2. Choose a time to publish

See this on the top-right of your post:

Publish Panel

Click on “Edit” next to “Publish immediately” and schedule the date and time you want your article published.

That’s it! Now your blog article will be posted and tweeted out (if you’re setup) at the date and time you’ve selected.

Available to Bronze – Platinum. AWESOME!

Sunday, April 1, 2012 In Technology

3 Reasons Why Your Website is Obsolete

Your website probably hasn’t been updated in months, and your website company hasn’t offered anything new in years… face it – your website is obsolete. Here are the 3 top reasons why:

It’s not on WordPress

If you’re like 95% of REALTORS® then your website is built on outdated, proprietary technology that, though once fancy, is now soggy, bloated, and stagnant. Because it’s non-standard, it’s impossible to improve and will never be able to compete with the thousands of programmers who contribute to WordPress on a daily basis.
It’ll Never be on WordPress

A website that doesn’t start on WordPress will never be on wordpress. Why? Because software development to migrate platforms and customers is just too expensive. If it were possible, then it would’ve already been done.
Your website company has too many bad customers

Despite technical illiteracy being unacceptable in EVERY industry (INCLUDING REAL ESTATE!!), there are just too may REALTORS® out there who have no idea what they’re doing with technology. They choke the support lines of their website companies with questions like:

How do I edit the content in my page?

and

What’s the difference between a domain name and my email address?

Unfortunately this drains the resources of these companies and eventually paralyzes them. Forget innovation in an environment like that.

Our philosophy is to build a website platform that you can 100% customize and build your business around. We’ll take care of our specialty – IDX, listing integration, and hosting – and you can do the rest – hire the experts in SEO, design, etc.