In order to keep your own site free from the mold and mildew that have grown on many other real estate websites, you need to keep it updated. I’ve gathered a few tips that you can use to keep your website from getting stale.

Keep your content both original and fresh

This point is very simple — the more content you have on your site, the more visitors you will get. This does not mean that you can or should just copy someone else’s content and then slap it on your own site. Your content needs to be original, and it needs to be changed on a regular basis. Keep in mind that people would like to see something new each time they visit. Even simple color or layout changes can make a big difference in how your site is perceived.

Review your site on a regular basis

If you saw a car on the street with a cracked windshield, missing headlight, bald tires, and a fading paint job, your first assumption would be that the owner doesn’t maintain the car properly. The same idea is true with a website. Broken links, bad typesetting, and distorted pictures are the result of bad website maintenance, and it reflects badly on you, the webmaster.

I suggest reviewing your website at least once per month for these types of issues. You need to go through every page of your site to make sure these kinds of things aren’t occurring. You will want to check for things such as general functionality, working contact forms, a working home search / IDX application (try ours!), and properly working home evaluation and mortgage tools.

Track your results

The best advice I can give you for tracking your results is to add enough contact forms and statistical tracking code to your website so that you’re always getting both direct and indirect feedback. Visitors are almost always the best source of ideas and suggestions on what you can do to improve your marketing efforts. However, since not everyone will fill out a feedback form, you’ll want to use Google Analytics (or something similar) to track how successful your website is on an objective, number-driven basis.

Good websites are never finished. With proper maintenance, good websites will become great websites!

When you are looking to purchase a domain name there are a few items you need to take into consideration. The first thing and most obvious item you need to consider is what you would like your domain name to be, and the second item to consider is where you are going to purchase your domain name.

The key quality in choosing your domain name is whether or not it is easy to remember. Ultimately, make sure it’s relatively short in length. Studies show that the average length of a domain name is 11 characters long, meaning that most people agree that shorter is generally better. To see what I mean, take a look at some major companies and see if their domain names are easy or difficult to remember. Washington Mutual’s domain name is WaMu.com (very simple since they are pushing to be called WaMu). Prudential’s domain name is prudential.com. Other good domain names I have seen in the real estate space are: bringdreamshome.com, lillingtonforsale.com, yourdreamsyourhome.com, and texashomecentral.com; all of these are relatively short and easy to remember.

Lots of agents use their names as domain names. This works well providing that your name is easy to remember and easy to spell. If your name is more complicated, it is recommended that you explore other options like using your city name in conjunction with the words “real estate” (such as irvinerealestate.com) or something catchy about buying or selling homes (such as jensellsirvinehomes.com).

Letting people know what you are about in your domain name will help with getting them to remember it. If I have a website at jennifermabe.com and I am selling jewelry, my domain name doesn’t give you a clue as to what I am putting on the Internet. If I have a domain name of jewelrybyjennifer.com, I will be better promoting myself and what I am doing. This is not a requirement, but rather something to keep in mind.

Once you have decided on your domain name, check to see if it is available for registration (link). If your requested domain name is not available, that link will give you suggestions as to others that are available. If your domain name is available, you will want to purchase it right away.

You can purchase your domain name with any registrar (e.g., Go Daddy and Network Solutions). The main difference between the different registrars is the price. You can point your purchased domain name at any hosting company’s servers. Additionally, you can purchase your domain name directly through us, in which case you will have the benefit of not having to do any of the work to set it up.

Transferring a Domain Name

Although transferring a domain name is different with every company, the overall process is mostly the same. In order to execute the process, you’ll have to perform the following steps:

1. Unlock your domain name at your current registrar
2. Make a transfer request through the new registrar
3. Obtain a transfer number from your current registrar and enter it at your new registrar
4. Wait for the transfer to take effect (up to 60 days, depending on who the companies are)

If you do not know how your registrar handles transfers you can check their FAQ or contact their support center. Transferring a domain name is often very annoying; I would recommend avoiding it unless you really do not like your current registrar.

Changing Settings for Your Domain Name

The most frequently changed setting for a domain name are the domain name servers (DNS). To change your domain name servers, you may or may not need to unlock your domain name through your registrar’s online control panel. Once unlocked, you should be able to access a page in the admin area named something to the effect of Domain Name Servers or DNS. If you are switching your domain name servers to Diverse Solutions you will need to change them to ns1.diversesolutions.com and ns2.diversesolutions.com.

(*A note about changing your DNS: this will affect any email addresses you may have set up with your domain name (e.g., Jennifer@jennifermabe.com). Please let us or your new website hosting company know if you have email addresses so that they can be addressed and set up right away or other options can be explored. If you have your email addresses through another company and you would like to keep it that way, we can change the MX Records so that nothing with your email addresses will change.)

To forward your domain name, there will usually be an area called Domain Forwarding or something similar to that. You would then just enter in the domain name that you would like to forward the domain to.

Domain names play an important part in the website process. This is how people will access your website. Remember to place your domain name on all of your marketing materials and in your email signature.

First of all there is a distinct new look, as you can see in the screenshot to the right. The main improvement in the overall user interface is that all your main tasks and email-folders are located in the easy-to-use menu on the left hand side.

Additionally the rest of the available options and tasks are in the streamlined dropdown menus in the top-left of the page. One thing to note on this interface is that when you have enough emails that paging is required, you have to remember that the paging interface is in the top-right of the page.

Another major thing of note is that when you are looking at an email, if you want to take an action on the email, (such as Reply, Forward, Delete, etc.) the buttons are on the very top of the page, you can see this reflected in the screenshot on the left.

Secondly, if you can’t find the “button” or “dropdown” to take an action, create a new item, etc. in any of the areas of webmail, try right-clicking your mouse, more than likely a simple list of options has been given to you. For example, from your list of emails, you can right click on any given email and take any of the necessary actions on it, such as reply or forward.

Anyway, we hope you like the new webmail, and as always, if you have a problem feel free to call or email our support team. Thanks!

Clear Your Cache

Internet browsers will often create a “cache” of websites so that it can load them more quickly on subsequent visits. However, this creates an issue when changes are made to a website since these changes can appear not to have taken effect. If you suspect that this has happened to you, you can clear your cache using the following steps.

• Internet Explorer 6 – Go to the “Tools” menu at the top of the window and then click “Internet Options.” This will bring up a new window, and in the middle of the window will be an option called “Delete Files.” When you click this button, it will bring up another new window, at which point you should click on the “Ok” button. Once it is done processing, close all Internet browser windows. Reopen one, and then bring up your website. While looking at the website, hold down the control button on your keyboard and click on the refresh button on your browser.
• Internet Explorer 7 – Go to the “Tools” menu at the top of the window, click “Clear Browsing History,” and then click “Delete Temporary Internet Files.” Once it is done processing, close all Internet browser windows. Reopen one, and then bring up your website. While looking at the website, hold down the control button on your keyboard and click on the refresh button on your browser.
• Mozilla Firefox – Go to the “Tools” menu at the top of the window and then click “Clear Private Data.” Make sure only the “Cache” checkbox is checked, and then click ok. Once it is done processing, close all Internet browser windows. Reopen one, and then bring up your website. While looking at the website, hold down the control button on your keyboard and click on the refresh button on your browser.

Publishing

Another thing that often causes confusion when editing the website is publishing. Many times people will preview a change, see it there, and then just go straight to the “View My Site” option without clicking the “Publish” button. Doing this will lead to the assumption that the change has not taken effect. When my customers call or email me with this problem, the first thing that I often try is republishing the area in which the change was made; this usually solves the problem. If you are experiencing difficulty in having changes take effect, please try republishing the areas that are connected to the change that you have made directly instead of the main “Publish” area.

One specific example of where this often happens is in the Featured Properties section. You may wonder why you can delete a property from the page but still see the property appear in the featured properties slideshow. If you’d like to fix this problem, you can edit another one of your featured properties without making any real changes, go to the save step, and then publish the property. Afterwards, go into “Template Options” section of your AgentCast admin, go to the “Done” step, and click publish. This will reset the slideshow, and your deleted property will be properly removed.

Featured Properties Slideshows

Above, I have given one tip into the world of the featured properties slideshow, but I do have some more.

First, the featured properties slideshow takes the first image of each of the featured properties added to the “Featured Property” section of AgentCast. If you’d like to change which picture is first, you easily reorder the properties using the “Reorder Properties” option in that section.

Next, take a look at two of our templates that have a built in featured properties slideshow.

In the first one, the featured properties slideshow cannot be anything other than just that, a featured properties slideshow. In the second, because there isn’t any wording associated with any of the photographs, and because they are not links to real properties, it can be “cheated” in a way to be a slideshow of any images desired. If you would like to do this for your own site, you can add a number of featured properties, add a single image to each, and make sure the “Display in Featured Properties Slideshow” checkbox is checked and the “Display in Featured Properties Listing” is unchecked for each. Also, on the actual properties, it is necessary to reverse the above options to make sure the “fake properties” are not displayed with the real ones, and vice-versa. These options can also be used for choosing not to display properties that are not as beautiful as desired for the featured properties slideshow.

Slideshow Builder

Adding a slideshow to your content pages is a great way to spruce up a page and make it more appealing to a reader. To add a slideshow to a page, the first thing that needs to be done is to upload the desired images into file manager; you can view step-by-step instructions on how to do this in the support center in your AgentCast admin. The next step is to create the slideshow in the slideshow builder; you can also view step-by-step instructions for this in the support center in your AgentCast admin. Finally, it is necessary to add the slideshow to the page of content. In order to do this, edit the page in the “Content Manager” section, place the cursor where the slideshow should go, and click on the “Snippets” dropdown to choose the desired slideshow. Once the page is saved and published, it will display the slideshow and the page will have pizzazz.

File Manager Folders

Using folders in the “File Manager” section is essential to keeping an organized file library. Many times I encounter file libraries that have all of the images in only one folder, often with duplicates, making it very difficult to find the desired image. Create a file folder for any new property and any new area that you are going to be using images for. This will really help when trying to locate the proper image for a featured property or content page.

Editing Photo Sizes

Often times I have had to change the sizes of photos for clients complaining that their photos are not showing up correctly. The featured properties slideshows do not automatically resize photos, and most photos straight from a camera are very large. I would recommend modifying the size of your images before you upload them into file manager. If this is not something that you know how to do, or you do not believe that you have the proper programs on your computer, you can upload the full size photos and then modify them in file manager.

To do this, you can click on the file name while in file manager. Doing so will bring up information about the image near the bottom of the window. To the right of the image’s information, there will be an icon of a piece of paper with a pencil on it. This icon is an edit button that will take you to a new window where you can edit the image. The window will have many editing options, including the ability to change the size of the image. The editor is only going to give you the option to change the width in order to keep the image proportions correct instead of stretching or squashing the image.

Each of our templates has a different slideshow size. If you have any questions about the sizes, please contact your Account Executive and they will be happy to help you with this.

Pasting Text Into Content Manager

Pasting text into content manager is a risky ordeal. Programs like Microsoft Word do not have the same programming as our content manager and will often cause problems when text is pasted directly from one program to the other. However, I would always recommend writing your content in a program directly onto your computer instead of over the Internet in our content manager since, if anything happens to your connection, you could loose your content. If you use a word processing program like Word on your computer, I would recommend pasting your content into Notepad first and then copying and pasting that text into the content manager. The reason I suggest this is because Notepad will remove any formatting that your content was given so that it will not negatively affect your content manager. Doing this will ultimately avoid unnecessary complications when editing the page later on.

Shift + Enter

When formatting your content in content manager, just hitting Enter will cause what looks like a double space. This is because it creates a paragraph tag in the HTML of the page. In order to just get a single line break, you will need to hold down the shift key on your keyboard and hit the enter key at the same time.

Background Color

In the “Site Options” section, there is a step called “Colors.” There are two color boxes here, one for “Links” and one for “Background.” The background color override is a neat option that allows another color to be added to the website. You can see some examples below.

Normally, the background of the content would be the same color as the main background. The trick for the first example is that the home page content needs to be put into a table with a background color set to the other content’s background colors. To do this, right click on the table in content manager and choose “Table Options.” Then, on the advanced tab, change the background color; I recommend copying and pasting the hex number from the first color box in the Template Options since it will give you the exact color you are looking for. Since the second example has a background that is always going to be gray and pinstriped the change is a bit trickier. Please contact your Account Executive for more information on how to do that.

Support Center

For my last trick, I bring you the Support Center. It is located in your AgentCast admin area and holds many secrets to the AgentCast product. Please use this valuable addition to our AgentCast office as it will help you in making changes to your website. If there are any questions that you have that the Support Center doesn’t answer, you can always contact your Account Executive and they will be happy to assist.

I hope that my knowledge of our AgentCast office has assisted in your quest of knowledge to create the best real estate website in the business. Thanks for the audience!

One of the first mistakes people make with their website is not updating it. They initially spend a lot of time in the beginning process of building the site, but over time, it becomes outdated. Maintaining a website is just as important as having a website. A variety of things can be done so this doesn’t happen to your own website.

Update your pictures

Users that have visited your website are not going to want to see the same thing six months down the road. Visitors will notice this, assume your information is also not up to date, and leave. In addition to updating your content, keeping your site visually stimulating will also increase the amount of time visitors spend on your site.

Review your website

I highly recommend this. I would suggest clicking through your website at least every two weeks and make sure everything is working as it should. Look for things such as links to pages that have been taken down or broken pictures, especially with links and images that reference third-party sites. Too many of these occurrences will lead people to believe you don’t visit your website that much and it will send them going somewhere else to find the information they are looking for.

Research the Competition

One way to keep your website up to date is to visit sites that relate to yours. Find out what things your competitors may be doing that could possibly work for you. For example a site may contain a feature on it that would keep visitors returning. Including these features to your site is a must to keep it competitive.

The Internet is growing everyday. More and more people are setting up websites. The sites that stay updated and current are the ones that succeed.