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A WordPress Blog as Your Real Estate Website

admin — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 07:42:08 +0000

Author : James Kimmons

A blog is a website … really:

The first thing that you need to do as a real estate professional is to get out of the trap of thinking that websites are one thing and blogs are another. They can be, but some of the most successful websites out there are built on WordPress, a blogging system and software.While blogs, or weblogs, were designed to be personal online journals, they have evolved and suit business needs very well as they can be totally indistinguishable from any other “website” out there. Using page design and themes, a WordPress blog will appear as any other website to the visitor while allowing you to take advantage of the blog format.

If you have static pages, WordPress Will Look the Same:

As there is information that rarely changes on a real estate website, WordPress will allow you to do exactly the same as you would with any website; build a page that displays your information and graphics the way that you want.So, a WordPress site can have static pages that the visitor will see as a normal website, not a string of “posts.” However, static websites don’t get a lot of SEO clout, simply because they are static. You need new and fresh content to make the search engines happy. That’s where combining your static content with blogging benefits will make your site a better sales lead generator.

With categories, a blog arranges your material:

One reason blogs became so popular so fast is that they allow the blogger to set up categories and apply one or more categories to a blog post. A “post” is the same as an article. The blogging software generates website pages for each category, so the blogger doesn’t have to get involved in page layout or how things will display. All they have to do is write a post and assign it to one or more categories.What you need to realize right now is that you only need to break out your content into logical topics (categories), and WordPress will lay your pages out automatically, with each post on the proper category page.

This is the BEST way to get business from the Web:

Too many real estate professionals shy away from blogging because they see it as a commitment to “being a writer,” and having to write new articles several times a week. They don’t see themselves as writers, and it is too intimidating to set up a blog website that requires regular new content to be successful. REMEMBER: It really isn’t a choice. If you have a limited budget and want to compete in the Internet real estate search world, a blog is the ONLY way to go!Some of the biggest template site vendors will disagree mightily, and some of those provide blogs, but I’ll stick by my statement.

The independence and control factors:

I’m not saying that a template site that provides a blogging component can’t be as effective as a self-hosted WordPress blog. However, you’ve just injected another entity between you and your valuable content. The template provider is hosting your content and site, and could make changes that impact your site, or even go out of business, leaving you with a marketing disaster.While you will still have one vendor between you and your content with a self-hosted WordPress blog, it will only be the website host providing the space, like GoDaddy or Yahoo. It won’t be a third party who is hosting & giving you a blog site.

Flexibility & customization with WordPress:

I’ve used a template site with a blog component, and it worked well. However, I became disenchanted with the limitations in design and theme that came with using their template blog setup. I couldn’t do things that I knew would make my site more visitor-friendly and bring me more business.Using a self-hosted WordPress blog site, I can choose from thousands of themes, then customize more from there. Whether it’s colors or special “plugins” that add features and functionality, there are almost no limits on how my WordPress real estate website can look and function.

Self-hosted WordPress.org vs free WordPress.com:

Without a lot of technical jargon, you have two choices for a WordPress site setup:1. You get a free site at WordPress.com, and you can point a custom domain name at it. You must choose from one of their offered templates, or themes. And, you are not able to choose from many thousands of “plugins” that enhance your site’s look and functionality.

2. You pay to host your site at an ISP (Internet Service Provider) like GoDaddy or Hostgator. Because you’re paying for and controlling the Web space, you can use any plugin you want and choose from thousands more themes. Cost? Under $100/year.

I only recommend self-hosting.

Automatically Upgrade Plugins for Your Wordpress Blog

admin — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 07:28:59 +0000

Author : Angela Bradley

If you are running a new version of Wordpress, and one of your addons goes out of date, you will be alerted from the admin control panel. You will see a number next to where it says “Plugins” on the left hand menu. The number is how many of your mods are out of date. If you click on this, you will be taken to the plugins page, where each out of date plugin will have the option to “upgrade automatically”.

If you choose to upgrade automatically you will be taken to a page that asks for your FTP information. Your browser will probably save your hostname and username so you will probably only need to retype your password. Hitting the “Proceed” button will deactivate the plugin, download the new version, unzip and install it, and then reactivate it.

If you are unfamiliar with how to install addons for yourself, this is a handy way to keep your site up to date without having to contact your programmer. Most of the time this will work fine with no bumps. This is however an automated process and can’t think like a human, so be sure that your site is backed up on a regular basis incase something goes wrong. Also keep in mind that this will replace all of the files in the plugin, so if you have any customization that you don’t want overwritten, you will want to manually update the plugin.

ASP vs. PHP

admin — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 06:43:47 +0000

Author : Halstatt Pires

When building web sites, ASP and PHP are very popular languages. Here’s my opinion on whether ASP or PHP is best

ASP v. PHP

Both ASP and PHP are languages used to build Dynamic Web sites that can interact with Databases and exchange information. ASP (Active Server Pages) is from Microsoft and is used with IIS (Internet Information Server) that runs on Microsoft Servers. PHP (Personal Home Pages) is from Rasmus Lerdorf, who originally designed this parsing language which was later modified by different people. It runs on Unix and Linux servers and it also has an NT server version.

There are a lot of differences between ASP and PHP.

Cost

To run ASP programs one needs IIS installed on a Windows platform server, which is not free. PHP programs run on Linux, which is free. Even the connectivity of the database is expensive in the case of ASP as MS-SQL is a product of Microsoft that needs to be purchased. PHP generally uses MySQL, which is freely available.

Speed

If we compare the speed of ASP and PHP then PHP has an upper hand. PHP code runs faster than ASP. ASP is built on COM based architecture, which is an overhead for the server whereas PHP code runs in its own memory space.

Platform Compatibility

PHP programs can run on various platforms like Linux, Unix, Windows and Solaris whereas ASP is mainly associated with Windows platforms. However, ASP can run on a Linux platform with ASP-Apache installed on the server.

Additional Costs

Many of the tools used in PHP are free of cost and since PHP is open source a lot of code can be found in open source forums. PHP has inbuilt features like ftp, email from a web page or even encryption mechanisms but in ASP such features are not built in and some additional components are required. Therefore an additional cost is incurred for such components.

Base Language

PHP is based on C++ language and the syntax used in PHP is quite similar to C/C++. C/C++ is still considered the best programming language by many programmers and people who love this language would surely feel more comfortable with the syntax of PHP. ASP on the other hand has a more Visual Basic kind of syntax that again is closely related to only Microsoft products. So, it depends on a person-to-person which language he or she is comfortable

Database Connectivity

PHP, being extremely flexible, can connect to various databases, the most popular being MySQL. ASP mainly uses MS-SQL.

Conclusion

Both languages have their advantages specific to users. Some would argue that both the languages have their own importance and depending on the user’s requirements the language and the platform can be chosen. If we talk about developing a discussion board then ASP is equally capable but many feel the best discussion boards are developed in PHP. If a user is looking for some e-commerce application development then many would call ASP the ideal choice. This does not mean that PHP cannot provide e-commerce solutions, only that many people choose ASP.

From my perspective, PHP is an all around better choice than ASP.