With the new IDX and template sale along with the Real Estate
Webmasters website update, I'm sure everyone at REW is pretty busy
right now. And I've been dealing with several REW employees. In
fact, I'm not sure who to ask what any longer.
New REW Templates
I'm learning all about my new template and IDX 3.0. I've had to
further upgrade the IDX to suit my tastes and I've got 2 days to
test it out. Have to check it out after this post as I was just
notified it is finished.
My prior Cook County real estate website had a Wordpress blog
attached to it. Now it is a seamless REW blog. I realized that
although all of the posts seem to have been transferred over, not
all of the categories were. So I have to go through all of my blog
posts and re-add categories and check mark them on the individual
blogs. Whew!
Seems like my community pages didn't transfer over. I guess it's
because of the new IDX search system and the prior snippets won't
work with the new sites. I now have to learn the new way to add a
specific search in a page and recreate each community page. Whew
again!
Rew Blog/Site
With the new Real Estate Webmasters
website which has changed our blogs, I now have to go through every
blog I ever posted here and add in "Related Links" as I never used
them before. But besides the blog signatures, that will be the only
other way to get an anchor text external link. The Blogroll is
still nofollow although Morgan mentioned changing that.
A Step at a Time
This is a large amount of changes and I'm trying to break off a
chunk here and there since it's too much to tackle at once. It took
me a while just to configure the new IDX default search and I'm
sure the people at REW think it should be easy, but I was having
trouble with it. I guess I just need to get more sleep, but this
stuff is keeping me up!
Oh, and did I mention we're working on our foreclosure home so we
can move in asap and we're selling our current home? I hate to say
it, but I'm glad things have slowed down in real estate this past
week, although I need to sell my home (I do have a buyer but the
financing isn't looking too good).
OK, time to do some more homework...
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There are currently 7 Responses to this blog entry.
cmontes
Hi Judy,
I'm also working on the new 3.0 IDX. However for the most part I have found that building the snippets was so much easier than the first IDX. I only had trouble with 4 snippets ( Sorry Gerry T. Again!) That was my fault for not even trying to see how flexible the IDX builder really is. It gives you alot more options on how you want to view results.
Judy, what I did was I had both pages open, the backend and the dev URL. I would suggest going down the list and deleting the old ones and right away switch to the backend of the dev URL and not change the names of any of the snippets. It only took me about 30 seconds max to build each one. Also I did not complicate how the results would come out. I simply combined single family and condos to give me all the results on one page.
The other feature I love about the 3.0 is the amount of criteria you can load on the IDX page. All you have to do is click the boxes for the criteria you want your users to work with. It's that easy!!This I think is the best part of it all for the user. The ability to even search by school names is awesome.
I haven't even gone into how the listing are displayed! They almost look like the LEC's and the listing URL's are far more descriptive than the previous ones which I'm certain will help rankings.
Good luck with it Judy I truly think that you will find the switch well worth it.
Thanks to everyone at REW for putting so much thought into this site. Anyone thinking of getting a template can't go wrong with this new (3.0) system. It is far easier to set up once you get the hang of it. Special thanks to Morgan, Gerry, Alex & Moriah for all your guidance and patience!
REW Val
Sounds like you've got your hands full - how are you coming along?
judyo
Thanks cmontes - I do love the look of the new site and of course I've been busy the past couple of days so still need to work on my new community pages. I want single family separate from attached so I need to recreate both pages for each community. Good thing is, I'm only going to feature a handful of communities this time around, at least to start out with.
Val - I've still got a few issues I need answers for and have posted them in the help forums. I still can't upload photos (need to give an url - it's like that on the REW blogs, too - must be from the entire REW changeover or something that's turned off on my end that I can't control). I'm also trying to figure out how the Quick Search IDX portion works - sounds like support is checking it out as something isn't working right.
I'm excited to get the new site live but need to work out a few bugs first and get my community pages finished.
Calzephyr
Judy,
Keeping an eye on your new site progress as I went for a new one for the Davis market too. Looks like there is lot's of great new features.
-Tom W.
judyo
Hey Tom, should be going live soon - share your's when it's ready.
Flasch186
I remember spending a month on the forums before they gave me the DEV site. I thought I had a pretty good grip on things and then I dove in and felt like a fish out of water. It took some time but I finally got enough of a grip on things to make it work and Im sure you will too. We love our REW site...now if we could just get on the front page of google for broader searches I'd be a happy camper. You should see some of the other local realtor's sites that show up there....TERRIBLE. I digress....good luck!
judyo
Well, it's good to know I can still learn new things. Speeding through it now and I'm ready on my end to go live. At first I was sad to lose my original REW template (it's been my baby) and my built-in WP blog, but I'm ready for the new improved site.