One of my goals in expanding the social media footprint for Diverse Solutions is to use some of the best tools at our disposal. I’m a big fan of audio podcast interviews. I was lucky enough to bring two Diverse Solutions IDX users to the mic to discuss their experience with the product and how they are using it to provide best-of-breed web marketing solutions in their respective markets.
They are two of the most recognized names in the blogosphere and RE.net. Jim Duncan from RealCentralVa.Com in Virginia and Jay Thompson, the infamous Phoenix Real Estate Guy. Both Jim and Jay have infused WordPress blog platforms with Diverse Solutions IDX to create dynamic web marketing platforms. Tune in and hear how they are implementing the features of the Control Panel to go way beyond basic search. If you have specific questions for either Jim or Jay, please leave a comment and they will be happy to respond.
Click to Listen: Jay Thompson & Jim Duncan Discuss Their Diverse Solutions Experience (.mp3)
We will be doing a regular series of audio and video podcasts so stay tuned for more.
Thanks Mike and Jim, it was fun, and hopefully useful to others in the Diverse Solutions community.
Here is the plugin I mentioned that allows RSS feeds to be displayed as HTML:
http://rawlinson.us/blog/articles/feedlist-plugin/
Jim and Jay – thanks for sharing your experiences and implementation of DS in your blog. Jim’s page with the ‘Listing Feed’ is fantastic — the simplest things can be the most powerful.
A couple basic navigation metaphors have tripped up a couple of my pilot users that I’ve observed:
1. When entering multiple zip codes (or Cities, neighborhoods, etc), users must press ‘enter’. The natural tendency is to press enter to invoke the search, not to have these added to the criteria. Some don’t intuitively understand this capability.
2. Some don’t quickly find the ‘Search’ and ‘Reset’ since it’s at the bottom.
Don’t know if you’ve seen this, or if my audience here outside of D.C. is made up primarily of knuckle heads. Thanks again for sharing.
@Bruce
1. We had the same debate here in the office regarding this before our latest release. However, when we had dozens of beta testers give us their feedback notably only one mentioned anything. So the choice was made to move on to other enhancements and get further feedback later on down the road. We have now received some more feed back from our customers and have a couple ideas of how we can make this even better. Look for future enhancements in up coming releases. Note: the users can also press tab or click a zip code, city, etc from the suggestions drop down.
2. While map search functionality doesn’t require the search button to be clicked it does if they want to refine the results. At that point their attention is focused on the left side and should easily find the search and reset buttons as they view the search criteria options. But I do want to look into this a little further to see what we can do to improve this if there is some question about it.
Jay, the RSS->HTML plugin is reported to not work with WordPress 2.7. Are you seeing these problems? I’m trying to get my various feeds laid out in my pages right now and need this functionality. Best, @derecshuler
If you are having trouble with that plugin I would suggest setting up WP-O-Matic and have it post from the RSS feeds. That plugin does work with WordPress 2.7. Let me know if you need help.