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.

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.

-Update 8/20/2008 4pm
Everything went almost as planned.  We didn’t quite get everything accomplished we wanted to last night within our maintenance window so we will be finishing the rest up tonight.  So starting at 12:30am PST 8/21/2008 we will be making the last of the upgrades.  Again, there may be sporadic service during this time but the maintenance shouldn’t last more than 2 hours.

So, what’s the technical issue you ask? Well, think of it this way, we’ve all eaten a microwave dinner before. Each dinner has a set time that you need to leave it in the microwave for. Well, what if someone went into the grocery store, and mixed up the instructions on all of the microwave meals? Everyone who bought those meals would either get a cold dinner, or a 15 minute cleanup job after the dinner exploded. This is exactly what some of you are experiencing with our products.

Our colleagues at Advanced Access have an incompatibility in their 3.0 product thus rendering up to date Internet Explorers (specifically version 7) useless in areas of the product. Now, we’re NOT trying to pick on anyone, we are simply trying to support our customers (AA, if you’re reading this, and anything I have said is inaccurate I will correct and cite any errors). To deal with this, they have had their users tell Internet Explorer to advertise that it is an older version than it really is (specifically telling IE7 to say it’s IE6). Well, fortunately this doesn’t cause frozen meals to explode, but it does make it impossible for a web developer to provide a consistent user experience for these fake-IE6-but-really-IE7 browsers.

Luckily not everyone subscribes to Advanced Access services, however every person that has followed their advice may be dealing with more and more websites that either look strange, or just plain don’t work.

So, after that lengthy explanation, if you ARE an Advanced Access switcher and aren’t sure if you’ve told your IE7 to say it’s IE6, go here: http://www.useragentstring.com/ and if it reads Internet Explorer 6, but you know you’re running 7 (hint: if you can make tabs in your IE, you have 7+) then you need to follow the instructions below.

The two ways we know that you may have changed your User-Agent string are via an installation downloaded from Microsoft, or via a “registry” file.

To find out if you’ve installed the Microsoft file go to “Add / Remove Programs” in your “Control Panel”, accessible from your “Start” menu. In “Add / Remove Programs” look for “User Agent String Utility” (click pictured at right for detail). If you find this item, click on it and press “Remove”, then follow the on-screen prompts. Afterwards, you should be a-ok.

If you do not have the Microsoft utility installed, it’s likely you have changed your registry. Because the windows registry is such a fickle beast, we really need to talk with you over the phone on how to correct any registry problems you have. This is because messing with your registry can sometimes be harmful to your computer, and we would like to diagnose the status of your Internet Explorer and registry before we advise any action.

Ok, that’s about it. I know this is extremely confusing, so if your User-Agent string doesn’t match up at http://www.useragentstring.com/ and you don’t know what to do, call us!

I / we have been incredibly busy lately, but when we saw the announcement, we knew we had to get this out to our customers ASAP. Well, I’m really happy to announce that it’s already been integrated! Check out this $2.7M Newport Beach beauty to see an example.

While I think it’s a really, really cool feature, there are limitations. First and foremost, it’s (obviously) only available in areas where Google has street view imagery. For example, just because we service the Charleston Trident MLS doesn’t mean that Google has street view there. Second, the placement and centering of the street view imagery is an inexact science at the moment. Our code currently tells Google’s servers where the house is, and they tell us if they have imagery there and then show it. Unfortunately, when Google does find a match, we don’t really know if the match they found actually represents the streets around the house. All that said though, it’s still an absolutely amazing technology that we are very grateful to Google for.

For now, it’s only enabled on our demo account, but if you drop a comment at the bottom with your name and a link to your dsSearchAgent IDX solution, I’ll be more than happy to enable it on your own account. We’ll should be able to add the option to enable / disable it on your own accounts to our new admin either today or Monday.

————————–

Update: You can now easily enable Google Street View in our Control Panel.

So, to get to the new admin, simply navigate your browser to http://controlpanel.diversesolutions.com and you will login with the same username and password you already use in our other admins. Additionally we’ve also put a big yellow notice on the dashboard of each of the affected admins, announcing the change and providing a link to auto-login.

Now, being this is a soft-release we’re allowing you to continue to use the old administration areas just in case, but only for a week. So on April 10th if you attempt to go to your old admin area, you will be forwarded to the new dsControlPanel. And the “Old Admin” link will be removed from the dsControlPanel navigation.

I’m sure many of you are going to say “how the heck do I use this thing?!”, so instead of calling, emailing, or quitting, we’ve provided you with demo videos. From anywhere in the admin you can click on the icon to get a popup of all our help videos. Additionally, each section that has a video will also have a icon directly to the left of the icon. We’re hoping these videos answer most of your questions. Let us know if you can’t find help for something.

We’re really proud of dsControlPanel and we hope you enjoy the new functionality and usability. Thanks everyone, and please, tell us what you think.

Everything is going smoothly with no noticeable slow down or loss of service during the upgrades. However, the maintenance on the admin/control panel is taking a little longer than expected.  It shouldn’t be much longer.  We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

4:30am

And we’re done.  Everything has been tested and is back to normal.  We shouldn’t have to do anything like this again for a while now.  Thank you for your understanding and support.

Diverse Solutions IT Team