For example:

(click image to enlarge)

The way the system is setup…

1. Link structure pages are generated by the plugin. Because these are not pages you can modify the disclaimer/logo info shows at the bottom of the main content container.

2. Any OTHER page with listing data you can control. You can add multiple widgets, several short code lines, etc to the main content area, sidebars, and depending on your other HTML widgets; maybe other parts of your pages. So, instead of showing the disclaimer beneath every instance of IDX data, we put that info in your site footer. This way you can put the data anywhere on any page and still be compliant.

How To Center the Disclaimer Text:

To center the disclaimer text that appears when  you use the dsIDXpress shortcode on a post or page, you’ll want to edit the footer.php file in your WordPress Theme files. What you’re looking for is this function:

…you want to add a div to it like this:

…then you can add some css to the style css:

…this margin will center the footer and properly align the disclaimer text in the center as opposed to the left like so:

Hope that helps… And if you’re not using dsIDXpress already, you can sign up for a demo account and give it a test drive here

• How to get your new mapping MLS IDX solution on your site,
• How to customize the look and feel of your new mapping solution,
• How to manage your visitors/registrations,
• How to create custom searches,
• How to direct IDX traffic back to your site,
• How to get started in using and managing your new contact management system,
• How to create and save custom email newsletters (create drip campaigns, etc.),
• How to manage the leads that have registered for your IDX account,
• How to get started with multi-user lead management (for Pro-Broker dsAgentReach users),

…and more.

To register, just log into your Control Panel and click on “Help via Webinar”. Simply select from the list of available times and follow the basic registration instructions and you’re set to go!

There will be time allotted for Q&A after each scheduled webinar. In the meantime, if you have any questions about dsSearchAgent or dsAgentReach, feel free to drop them in the comments below, we’re always happy to help!

Thank you for liking what we made.

We’d like to come right out and say that we DO set limits on the number of listings that can be shown / spidered / paged through for any given search. We currently have the limit set at 500 results per search, but we may adjust that in the future as we do more research and as MLS rules change. We implemented this limit for a number of reasons, the biggest of which is it prevent well ranked blogs in major metro areas from simply linking to the results page for the major city for that area and gobbling up the #1 position for ALL of the addresses in that area without doing any more work. This is NOT to say that you can’t put the entire MLS on your blog. Instead, what we strongly recommend based on our own research is for those who any indexable IDX solution, including our own, to deep link to smaller result sets and even individual listings.

In other words, if you’re a broker servicing Boston and wanted to use dsIDXpress (or, again, any indexable IDX), we’d encourage you to not just link to the search results for Boston and call it a day. Not only would the results for dsIDXpress be capped at 500 for that “search,” but the older results on, say, page 20 wouldn’t be indexed very well at all. Perhaps more importantly, it wouldn’t be helpful for your visitors either; after all, who really wants to look at ALL of the Boston listings in one sitting?

Instead, with dsIDXpress specifically, we’d recommend following our getting started guide and tailor both your link destinations and your site content to you visitors’ needs rather than trying to get everything indexed by search engines with no time investment and a single link. For example, the easiest first step would be to add the dsIDXpress listings or areas widgets to your blog and simply add the most popular communities you service to the widgets. Next, we’d recommend creating content pages for all of the communities you service and then using our Live Listings(sm) shortcode technology to insert an auto-updating property list directly into the content pages themselves. If you’re a broker as in the above example, you could even farm out the creation of content to your agents; they should know and be able to write a few paragraphs about the areas they specialize in better than anyone else. In that same community, zip, or city content page, you could also strategically link to property results for, say, listings in Fenway between $500k and $600k so that the content would be helpful to both search engines AND your website visitors.

Finally, for those of your concerned about getting banned from search engines for putting an indexable IDX on your site, we’d like to point out that there’d be thousands of sites already that would be banned if that were the case. Between all of the large brokers and national websites that do it already (Movato, Sawbuck Realty, Redfin, Realtor.com, Move, Homes.com, Yahoo! Real Estate, and the list goes on and on and on and on) and the agents / brokers who have the extremely expensive websites that also do it, we’ve never been aware of a single site that has been penalized for that alone. It’s certainly true that there can only be so many results in the “Google Top 10,” but that’s why recommending our best practices and encouraging you to spend some time tailoring your website to the communities or areas you service to get to the top of search engines for those areas.

Overall, we feel that there is a compelling argument to not be too concerned about duplicate MLS content due to the indexable IDX alone. If you create good content AND link appropriately to the IDX content, we’re confident that you’ll end up engaging your visitors more and rank well in search engines in no time at all. We’re sticking to our guns on this one.

P.S. This is neat. One of our original dsIDXpress beta testers, Jim Duncan, is ranking extremely well in Google by doing exactly what I talked about above. Check out this random Google search I did for 5453 Park Rd, Crozet. The #1 result that I see right now is that property on his domain with the dsIDXpress plugin generating the content. I also see Zillow, Yahoo! Real Estate, Realtor.com, and Homes.com in that list, but they’re all ranked below him. Sweet!

If you haven’t read our previous blog post on all the functionality contained in dsIDXpress, you may want to check it out right now. We now have our dsIDXpress “microsite” up and running as well. We have tons of details on the functionality on that site already, so rather than rehash all of that here, we encourage you to click through to the dsIDXpress site.

The reason we developed dsIDXpress was because we hear loud and clear how agents and brokers without tens-of-thousands of dollars to spend wanted to compete in search engines with the likes of Realtor.com, Redfin, Trulia, Homes.com, and other large brokerages. dsIDXpress provides all the tools and functionality to do just that at a tiny fraction of the cost. While we can’t guarantee — nor can anyone – that you’ll instantly rank #1 on Google for every address or MLS number in the MLS, dsIDXpress certainly gives you all the tools you need to do so. In fact, we already have seen a number of our trusted beta testers rank better than ALL of the aforementioned sites for given addresses in just the few short weeks they’ve been using dsIDXpress. Between our Live Listings(sm) shortcode functionality, our numerous widgets, and our listings and listing detail virtual pages, dsIDXpress will have you ranking well in search engines in no time at all.

I know that most of you have just been skimming this blog post up until this now with just one question in mind. “What’s the price?” you ask. Well, we’re happy to tell you that we’re offering limited time introductory pricing for this product at the ridiculously low price of just $29.95 per month per domain with NO CONTRACT! If you’re not already a proud owner of our dsSearchAgent Pro IDX solution, you’ll also need to pay a $99.95 setup fee. For those of you who already have dsSearchAgent Pro, or if you purchase dsSearchAgent Pro when you sign up, we’re not even going to charge a setup fee!

All that said, dsIDXpress is NOT meant to completely replace your IDX solution. On the one side, our new dsIDXpress product is meant to make it easy for you to add live MLS content to your blog as well as boost your long-tail search engine traffic. On the other side, our existing dsSearchAgent product is meant to be an interactive interface into your MLS’s data for your website visitors. dsIDXpress and dsSearchAgent are two different products for two different needs, but they’re certainly a great compliment to each other!

Again, we’re extremely excited to announce this product, and we can’t wait to see how our clients use it! You can read more about on the dsIDXpress site, you can request a free trial for your own blog, you can see it in the WordPress Plugin Directory, or you can simply contact our sales department to talk with someone about the product. Enjoy!

Through a mesh of ingenuity, and a bit of alchemy, our wizards (legit mad ones) have cooked up some magic for our IDX embedding code that automatically resizes the frame containing your IDX, to prevent the scrollbars from appearing. How cool is that?! And you don’t have to do anything to get this new functionality, it’s already enabled! That’s right, no additional fees, no additional configuration, it’s enabled and it just works.

One note however, you must be using our <script> tag, not a standard <iframe>. If you are using an <iframe> all you need to do is head to the dsSearchAgent Dashboard in your Control Panel and replace that old-and-moldy <iframe> with the nice and shiny <script> located in the “Add IDX To Your Site” section of the Dashboard page.

Let us know what you think!

Here’s an example of the lack of scroll bars in action: http://www.southorangecountyliving.com/Home_Search.htm

Overall, we were able to make a number of changes that decreased the initial size of our IDX by nearly 30%!! We made all of our images much, much leaner, we further combined our JavaScript and CSS into fewer files, and we removed some preloading where it just didn’t make sense anymore.

Additionally, we moved nearly all of our JavaScript, CSS, and images / icons to the same global network infrastructure that twitter, SmugMug, WordPress.com, Amazon, and other multi-million/billion dollar companies are using! The advantages we gained by making that move is that the majority of our IDX is now served from 14 locations around the world depending on the visitor’s location instead of just a single location. In other words, a dsSearchAgent visitor located in Boston will no longer have to wait for a myriad of image, JavaScript, and CSS requests to be served up from a data center 2,600 miles away in Los Angeles; instead, that visitor will pull all of that data from a dedicated cache location in Newark, NJ.

Speed matters. Google found that their traffic to Google maps increased by 25% after they shaved 20-30% off the initial size of the Google maps home page.  Amazon found (PowerPoint presentation) that for every 100 millisecond delay that they introduced in testing scenarios, they experienced a 1% drop in revenue. That’s huge!! Now that we’re leaner and closer to our visitors, we’re really excited to see what this does for our own traffic.

Anyway, give it a whirl. Drop us a comment and let us know what you think!

Walk Score helps people find walkable places to live. Walk Score calculates the walkability of an address by locating nearby stores, restaurants, schools, parks, etc. Walk Score measures how easy it is to live a car-lite lifestyle—not how pretty the area is for walking.

As an admiring fan of their Walk Score idea and their motto (“Software for Civic Live”), we knew that it was our responsibility to bring this greatness to our dsSearchAgent product, so that’s what we did. You can see the functionality on our demo IDX site. Starting today, all of our IDX clients can easily flip a switch in their control panel area to enable that great Walk Score functionality. Specifically, we’ve implemented it in the following four places on our IDX:

1. Search by Walk Score. Now this is cool. We love being able to put in an address Walk Score, but it makes it SO much better when you don’t have to constantly look up the Walk Score for each address for each property you’re interested in buying / leasing.
2. Sort by Walk Score. If you can search by Walk Score, you should be able to sort by Walk Score too. Just click in the “sort by” box at the top of the results and choose “Walk Score, Highest First” to order the search results from highest to lowest Walk Score.
3. View the Walk Score in both the search results and property details. Even if our clients choose not to show the “Search by Walk Score” search panel, they can still enable the functionality to allow their visitors to see the Walk Score for each listing in both the search results and property details. Check it out here; just look for the little walking guy icon at the top-right of each search result and in the top-right corner of the property details area.
4. View the Walk Score tile. When you click on the “Walk Score” link at the top-right of the property details area, you’ll see the Walk Score tile that shows all of the amenities that are factored into the score.

In case you missed the link above, check out the demo. We hope you’ll enjoy using it as much as we enjoyed building it into our system. We’re really excited to say that we’re the first national IDX provider that enables this type of functionality. We spent quite some time on the UI for this feature in order to make everyone happy. We also did our homework to make sure that the implementation appeased the compliance departments at the MLS’s who mandate their percentage of employed anal-retentive individuals to be greater than 80%.

Anyway, we’d love to hear what you think!

Update 3/31/09 8:47 AM: Just to be clear, if you have dsSearchAgent and you want the Walk Score functionality for your own IDX, you need to enable this in your control panel. There are two places you can enable the functionality, and they’re both in the “Options” section. First, you can drag over the “Walk Score” panel under the “Search Tab” tab. Second, under the “Result Tab”, you can put a tick in the “Show Walk Score in results” checkbox. The sort-by option for Walk Score will automatically show up as soon as you enable the search functionality.

New Options

• You can now set Acres as the default measure of Lot Size. This affects the “Lot Size” Criteria in the Search Tab.
• You can now turn off the pre-built Header in your Welcome and Listing Update emails.
• Additionally you can customize the Welcome Email subject line
• Now that we added Price Drops to the Property Details, we recognized that some of you may not want to see this on your IDX, so we’ve added an option to turn off Price Drops.
• If you need to limit your IDX search results to a specific state, you now can. Just add the state abbreviation to this new option in Control Panel.
• In your Welcome and Listing Update emails you can use mail-merge fields. These fields are [[Contact.<Field Name>]] and [[Agent.<Field Name>]]. You can get the <Field Name>s for Contacts from the title of each field when you edit a Contact in Control Panel. Here are some examples:
  • [[Contact.First Name]]
  • [[Contact.Last Name]]
  • [[Agent.First Name]]
  • [[Agent.Last Name]]
• Finally you can now customize all of the links to your IDX (from emails, rss, etc.) to link to the page you frame dsSearchAgent on your own website.

Custom Links

Custom Links now, by default, do not “lock” the Visitor into the result set the Custom Link defines. So effectively Custom Links only give the Visitor a “starting point” for searching. This removes the confusion and frustration for the Visitor, when visiting Custom Links. If you wish, you can go in and “lock” these results when you edit the Link in Control Panel, this will cause the Custom Link to behave as before.

Quick Search Module

We’ve added a new Quick Search Module for you to use. Quick Search Modules allow you to put a simple form on your site that allows the Visitor to choose some basic criteria, then are brought to your IDX Search and shown the results based on the criteria they chose.

Syndication

We recognize that many of you are very interested in syndicating your own listings to not only your own blogs, but also popular websites (like Trulia, Zillow, etc.). You’ve been always able to pull RSS feeds off of your Custom Links (limited to 25 results), but now we offer an RSS and “Trulia Feed Format”, or TFF feed, for your own listing, with no limit to the number of items in the feed. This effectively allows you to export your own listings to any site accepting the Trulia Feed Format, or RSS.

As far as the Feeds themselves go we’ve added a few things to  keep them fresh:

• Price change is shown in RSS feeds (where available)
• Community and Tract is now shown in RSS (where available)
• Links from RSS (and Emails) now consume the “Framed Page” option in your dsSearchAgent Options. Keeping visitors coming back to your site, instead of just dsSearchAgent.

Well last July Zillow released “Co-Branding” and in our update this November we integrated it, now I’m here to tell you how to set it up (yay). Check out how swanky it looks in our state of the art screenshot:

(hint: it’s that grey-banner at the top of the page.)

So, you want to set this up? The first thing you need is a Zillow Account (make one here). Once you’ve setup your Account, go to your Profile page and grab the “Screen Name” (see right). Save that for later in Notepad (windows) or Textedit (mac), as you’ll need it real soon.

Next, go into your dsSearchAgent Options in your Control Panel. Once in Options, go to the Agent Info Tab (it’s the first one) and on the bottom right you’ll see the “Zillow Screen Name” text box. Paste your screen name you saved from the first step here.

That’s it. Now all of the links to Zillow will show your mug and the pertinent information to get ahold of you (horrah).