In a previous life, I created a quick site as a favor to Jonathan Montgomery. At the time he was telling me how he was paying close to $100 a month for his main website – Cliffrose Real Estate, produced by so-called “real estate website experts”. Sorry, but i don’t think having an IP address as your URL is providing top notch web design or marketing 
We could list the other issues with the site but instead, lets focus on how we made things better for Jonathan and his company’s marketing!
Obviously the first thing we did was took the site into our weapon of choice – WordPress! From there, we reformatted all of his content into a more reader friendly version, cleaned up all those terrible URL’s and added some new, clean custom header graphics. This site turned out to be a multi-form site, with buyers forms, sellers, general inquiry and several other specific forms, so we formatted all of them for him too, with easy to recognize headers on the email response from each form submit!
Then we added our “bag of tricks” plug ins to help enhance the SEO of each post and page. The genius SEO move on this site though was the way we recommended handling Cliffrose Real Estate’s active listings. Instead of adding the listings through one of the fine listing plug ins, we suggested BLOGGING the properties instead!
Our reasoning for this was mainly that: Cliffrose already list their properties on the MLS database system anyway, so if Jonathan had to re-list the properties … why duplicate the same format? Instead we helped create a more reader friendly description of the property, with links to the MLS listing prominent throughout the post. And, because we created an “Active Listings” category in the blog, all of the currently active properties show up on the top menu of the site. Once a property sells, all Jonathan has to do is change the category to “recently sold” and the listing moves to a drop-down menu on the category bar. Easy!
But the part we really think will enhance the way we set up the active listings through the blog is in the use of the Tagaroo plug in, combined with the enhanced meta functionality of the Atahualpa theme we used for this customization. Each listing page takes maybe 15 minutes maximum to put together and tag, and in return Cliffrose Real Eestate get a lot of extra search engine exposure by adding their properties right into the blog content for search engines to pick up on and index.
What Jonathan Montgomery had to say about his new site:
Wow! I am impressed with how quickly you built my site.
Not to mention, It really looks good and gives my company
a professional look.My clients have already commented on how they like the
ease of use and I’ve gotten new clients that found us on Google.
Thanks guys! I really appreciate your work!
{ 1 trackback }
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
For certain types of portfolios, you might take a look at Indexhibit: http://www.indexhibit.org/
Geared more for the art/design crowd, it's a pretty cool platform.
For certain types of portfolios, you might take a look at Indexhibit: http://www.indexhibit.org/
Geared more for the art/design crowd, it's a pretty cool platform.
For certain types of portfolios, you might take a look at Indexhibit: http://www.indexhibit.org/
Geared more for the art/design crowd, it's a pretty cool platform.