Thank you for liking what we made.

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!

WORDPRESS PLUGIN

Built to run on top of the best blogging platforms out there. One that, if you’re not already using, we know you’ll love.

NO IFRAMES

All of the content is placed on the blog from a web service. The content is carefully constructed to be fully compliant with all current and future MLS rules since the web service controls the HTML.

SUPER EASY CONFIGURATION

All the blog owner needs to do after installing the module is add their activation key and click activate. That’s all! No PHP or WordPress guru needed.

SEMANTIC MARKUP

All of the HTML that the web service puts out is semantically appropriate. The benefit of semantic markup is that there’s less HTML bloat and more content for your visitors for search engines to see.

WIDGETS AND SHORTCODES

Widgets and shortcodes give the blogger more ways to interact with the data.

DEMO IT

We’ve set up a basic Wordpress Blog with dsIDXpress installed and configured, check it out: http://wp.idx.diversesolutions.com

BETA TEST IT

If you are interested in Beta testing, please sign up here: http://www.diversesolutions.com/beta-signup.aspx We do not have an ETA on a wide-release, but if we need testers in your area, we will contact you.

Our elves have been hard at work here at Diverse Solutions working on something special for you this holiday season. Over the last year or so we have been receiving requests for search engine index-able listings and rightfully so. It is a great way to generate some additional traffic to your website for that long tail segment. Some of you more tech savvy people have found a work around using our current dsSearchAgent Pro product but it’s not easy.   We’re going to change that.  Since WordPress is open source, has the ability to allow custom plug-ins and has become the platform of choice for a lot of websites/blogs these days we figured there isn’t a better choice to roll out our new IDX product on. We have created dsIDXpress.  It is a plug-in for WordPress that allows not only your clients to search the IDX natively via WordPress but more importantly it allows the search engines to index these listings too.

We are seeing some incredible results so far. One of our beta testers, who shall remain nameless, added the “property list” widget to his footer for his listings(14) and now the address for each one of those properties shows up #1 in Google with a link to the details page for that listing. In one week! I know talk is cheap but as we get more testers we’ll start showing some good hard evidence on how this thing kicks ass.

This is just a quick overview of what the plug-in can do at this time. We have many more ideas that are in the works that will be included in the plug in upon final release. Currently we are in the beta testing stage with this product and it is not available to the general public just yet. Product pricing and a final release date have not been set. If you are a current dsSearchAgent Pro client and would like to help us beta test this, or have comments, we’d love to hear from you.

Screenshots

Feature List

Widgets

• Search
  • Visitors can search for properties via a simple, pre-built WordPress search widget. The widget’s search criteria include the property type, city, min and max prices, min beds, min baths and square feet.
  • Each search widget can be customized with a title and a list of cities by the blog owner.
  • The search form is built in such a way that it can be submitted by any search engine that supports forms (of which Google is one).
• Area List
  • Visitors can see a simple list of links for the cities, communities, tracts, and zip codes that the blog owner has configured for each area list widget. All links created in these widgets are easily crawl-able by search engines.
• Property List
  • Visitors can see a configurable list of properties presented in three different modes. All of the HTML for the three modes is placed directly on the page containing the widget when the page is loaded; the modes are toggled via JavaScript. Search engines see all of the content for these widgets.
    • A list mode shows the properties as a simple list of links. These links are good for a simple, short, non-flashy display of the properties. These links are crawl-able by search engines
    • A map mode shows the properties on a map. On hover, a small property thumbnail photo is shown along with some relevant details.
    • A detailed mode shows the essential details of each property as well as a single 100px wide photo of each property. The different properties shown in the detailed mode can be navigated with “previous” and “next” buttons.
  • This widget can be configured to show a user-defined number of properties from four different sources.
    • It can show properties from a specific city, community, tract, or zip with a user-defined order (ex. top 10 properties in Laguna Beach order by highest price first).
    • It can show only the agent’s properties.
    • It can show only the office’s properties.
    • It can show properties from a link created in the control panel if you have our dsSearchAgent Pro IDX product. This allows for a great deal of flexibility.

Results

• The matching property results for the search criteria are displayed 25 per page with paging links at the top and bottom of the results.
• The search architecture is designed from the ground-up to be extremely fast. In many cases, we’ve found it to actually be faster than bringing up a WordPress post within the blog.
• Each listing in the results displays a 250px wide photo, the address, city, price, and other important information.
• Default sort order is to show newest listings first. This ensures a constant churn of properties in the first few pages of results for any search query.
• The title for the fake blog post (since we’re essentially displaying all of the results in a blog post) corresponds to the name of the area searched. The title is automatically placed in the area where the post title would go (usually in an H2 tag or something) and in the TITLE tag of the page.
  • Las Flores community searched => “Real estate in the Las Flores community”
  • Laguna Beach city searched => “Real estate in the city of Laguna beach”
  • Melinda Heights tract searched => “Real estate in the Melinda Heights area”
  • 92688 zip searched => “Real estate in the 92688 zip code”
• Link structure:
  • yourblog.com/idx/city/laguna-beach/ loads the 25 newest properties in Laguna Beach with links to the older results

Details

• Example for the title of the blog post and in the HTML TITLE tag: 2665 Riviera Dr, Laguna Beach, CA 92651 (MLS # L29755)
• Property details includes photo slideshow, all of the basic property info, the property description, many other fields and features, and a Google map showing the location of the property.
• Photo slideshow is loaded via JavaScript and Flash. Visitors without Flash / JavaScript, including search engines, will see the primary photo for the listing along with an appropriate ALT attribute for the photo.
• Link structure:
  • Simple example for loading property details for MLS #L29755: yourblog.com/idx/mls-l29755-2665_riviera_dr_laguna_beach_ca_92651

Shortcodes

• Shortcodes are small bits of text that can be embedded in blog pages or posts by the blogger. When the page or post is loaded, the shortcode text itself is replaced with other data. In the case of dsIDXpress, the IDX shortcodes are replaced with live data from the MLS so that whether the post / page is viewed the day it’s saved or 3 weeks after, the data will be up to date.
  • idx-listing: Will show property details when given an MLS number. Example: [idx-listing mlsnumber="U8000471"]
  • idx-listings: One example use of this shortcode would be when an agent wants to create a page for a particular city or community and wants to list the top 20 most-recently-listed properties in that area. Example: [idx-listings city="Laguna Beach"]

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!

So without further ado, please visit our launch site to learn more and try it out yourself: http://dslistingexpress.diversesolutions.com

We know you’ll like it.

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).

Visitor Registration Experience

One of our major updates is a significant overhaul of the Visitor Registration process. The first thing we improved here were the “calls to action” prompting Visitors to register. What we’ve done is not only added relevant links, but also improved the language to lead the Visitor to register more organically. Instead of saying plain old “Register” our links say “Get listing updates, Save Favorites, and More!”. We’ve also added more and moved around the existing links to receive Email or RSS alerts to make these abilities more prominent.

Moving along with Visitor Registration, lets talk about the Login and Register forms themselves. To help conversion, we “prettied” up the Login and Registration forms. You can see in our screenshots that we tried to make sure the Visitor wasn’t ever lost when working with either task.  With Registration we went a little farther, and we’re now giving the Visitor reasons, with screenshot examples, on why making an account is a good idea.

Additionally, with the Registration Form, you now have the ability to set it up as “two-stage”. What that means is we ask for only the most important fields in the “first” stage, then when the Visitor clicks [Continue] they are asked for more information. In this “two-stage” format, you also have the option to require filling in the second stage or not.

A few additional notes on Registration:

• We now save the Referring URL when a visitor registers
• You can remove all fields from Registration except Name, Email, Password
• You can choose between a single “Name” field or “First Name” and “Last Name” fields.

Visitor Profile

Also included in our mix of front-end features is a redesign of the Visitor’s Profile Section. The Profile is now situated on it’s very own page to improve usability. We spcifically improved the list for the Visitor’s Favorites, Viewed, and Noted Listings. In the Saved/Unsaved Searches section, we now allow the Visitor to edit the search criteria, and turn off email updates for specific Searches.

Map Markers

We had two obstacles to overcome on our map. The first was that we needed a good way to allow the Visitor to not only see, but also interact with listings “mapped” to the same location. The second obstacle was that it became clear a distinction between a Detached and Attached home was necessary.

When more than one listing is mapped to the same location we now do a few things. First we make the icon a little bit bigger, then we add a (+) to the top right of the marker. We do this to help visually explain to the Visitor that this marker is A. different, and B. more than one listing. Additionally, once you’ve hovered over one of these “multi-listing-markers” you’ll notice a slightly different experience than normal. We list the properties in a condensed, and scrolled format so the Visitor can locate any available listing on that location. As for Attached vs. Detached, you can see that we’ve added a new icon type for Attached homes.

Miscellaneous Changes

A couple very useful changes we’ve also made to the front-end experience are:

• Sort listing results by % Price Drop
• Baths are now split into Full and Half Baths (where available)
• Cookieless Browsing is now supported

Sorting by % Price Drop can be very useful when trying to find great deals on the MLS. And of course having Full+Half Baths makes finding the perfect home easier.

Cookieless Browsing actually serves to correct two separate issues. The first being simply that some people have turned off Cookies (don’t know what cookies are? check this out).

Cookies allow us to know who you are when your browser asks us for things like what listings to show and what colors to display. So when we don’t know who you are, we don’t know what to show you. So we’ve implemented additional ways for us to track what we should be showing you, thus removing the necessity of Cookies. The second issue is that most of you “frame” our idx in an <iframe> and in some browsers (notably Safari) the default option is to only give access to Cookies to “visited” sites. Well when a site is in an <iframe> it is not considered “visited”, therefore we don’t get Cookies. But now we don’t need Cookies anymore, so this issue is effectively fixed (yay!).

That’s it for this update. More to come. I promise.