To celebrate the launch of the new REW 2.0 platform we are offering our REW template websites with no setup fee.

Many of you missed out on the 12 days of Christmas special for REW templates well here is your chance to finally upgrade your old clunky website to a brand spanking new REW template.

So what's the deal?

Normally REW templates with the 2.0 platform are $740 setup and $480 per year combined hosting / platform fee.

For a limited time I am waiving the $740 setup fee - so act now if you would like to place your order and save yourself $740 but more importantly get a website that you can actually work with, looks good, ranks great and better yet generates leads.

What's the big deal with 2.0?

• How about a new CMS The brand new content…

Every month we convert current users of the Advanced Access website platform to the Real Estate Webmasters platform and I find myself confronted with the same questions each time - so I figured I would write this blog post to provide a convenient way for those converting or thinking of converting to get the answers they need before making the switch.

I am going to adopt the FAQ format for this post so that as more questions come in, I can update this post with those answers as well for the benefit of future readers - So let's begin.

Leaving Advanced Access frequently asked questions

Q: My Advanced Access website ranks well in search engines, if I switch to Real Estate Webmasters will I loose my rankings?

A: This is probably the biggest concern / most…

Or maybe just a little bit of fun :)

My buddy Eric Bramlett who has been really firing it up doing his own SEO lately (He is first and foremost a Realtor - or at least he used to be heh) came up with an idea for a fun contest - the "Greatest Real Estate Agent In The World Contest" (He gets a link because it was his idea - this is NOT my idea and I take no responsibility for the great relationships you may build or the learning you may experience. Also as with any attempts at experimenting with your site to try to rank it - please be sure you are familiar and adhere to Google's Guidelines For Webmasters.

Anyways - what this is, is a good old fashioned SEO contest - We pick a phrase that is not very competitive (So everyone can compete on a reletively…

Note: 50% discount time period on CMS 2.0 has now expired - Please do not use this post as a pricing guide for CMS 2.0 upgrades - instead visit the work orders forum to request an estimate.

On Wednesday, February 6th 2008 we will be launching our new backend for customer use as a beta.

We are very excited about the new funtionality that this system provides to our customers and with this upgrade this should make 2008 the best year ever for client closings from their REW websites.

This very affordable upgrade represents a complete overhaul of our backend including new CMS (With new wysiwyg editor) new featured listings management, and most importantly new lead management. Some of the more significant changes I will list below:

REW CMS: (Content…

As any REW community member knows, a few days ago we took a hit in our Google rankings. I am still working on getting these issues figured out and it will likely be a timely process as Matt Cutts and the rest of great folks of Google have their hands full as you can well imagine with webmasters contacting them with "My site has dropped in the rankings, can you look into it" type inquiries.

I am of course concerned with getting my rankings back up to their former glory. But it has actually been really nice having a chance to turn some of my focus inward towards the REW site as a whole trying to figure this whole mess out and while I'm in here - I might as well make even more improvements to our great community right?

Speaking of our great community and…

I tell you if I had a dollar for every time some sleazy company tried to spam our real estate community with their self promotional crap, I would not need to offer any fee for service development, I could just retire.

Who is the newest spammer? Xoompad IDX

They post "Revolutionary IDX Solution" as their tagline, and then go on to talk about how great their product is. First of all, this is spam and is NOT appreciated. In my opinion there is nothing revolutionary about xoom pad they are just copying quality IDX providers like REW. What is the most rediculous part though, is that they were trying to get away with posting their self promotional CRAP on a competitors website.

Our forum rules state no attempts at blatant self promotion - to date we have…

We need to create some new categories for REW - specifically I am thinking about the Writing Center

We need one definitly for Articles, so what to call it? Article writing? Article Publishing? I wonder what would be the most intuitive and still keep it separate from the writing for the web section which was meant as a writing for your website, maybe I should change the name? Read Full Post

We are redesigning the REW forum, skin located at http://www.realestatewebmasters.com/forum.php?s=&styleid=13 and I am looking for inspiration - where am I looking? Other forums of course

There are a lot of vbulletin hacks etc that have come out since the inception of the REW forum and we really need to upgrade.

Here are a few forums that inspire me and why.

http://www.daniweb.com - IMO the best tech forum in the world. Dani and I are great friends and I can honestly say she is most skilled vbulletin user I have ever met. What do I like about her forum?

Sections: Syndication is a great idea, have your RSS feeds right out there for others to grab and distribute. -  Quickstats right in the nav, that is pretty cool, not a new idea, but something… Read Full Post