Using Templates for Massive Replications

[RonnieG]

I'm lazy. Since I am lazy, I tend to try to make repetitive tasks, like building lots of city/town and subdivision pages, as easy, painless, consistent and error-free as possible.

To that end, I have built an "all inclusive" Notepad file where I keep all of my master templates. This includes a couple of typical IDX snippets, page titles and descriptions for various common page types, with their respective url aliases, anchor text, and not least of all, the complete (as html) body of a typical city/town/ subdivision search page, minus most of the community specific text, but including templates for the H1 and H2 tag lines that I generally like to use, placeholders for the snippet ID, and also including a couple of generic paragraph layouts, such as: "The <subdivisionname> subdivision of <cityname> is located in zip code <zip code>, and near <more local specifics>. It consists of about <number of> <property type(s)> homes. Home prices in <subdivisionname> generally range from about <general historical price range>. Contact <my name with link to contact.php> to schedule a showing for any home for sale in<subdivisionname>.

Then, when I need to create a bunch of new city and/or subdivision pages, I simply open up my master template file, do a global search/replace on the applicable community names, and voila, I am ready to copy/past the results directly into my new snippets and pages. Obviously the real creative work still needs to be done: further customizing the resulting page with content specific to the applicable city/subdivision, including 4-5 paragraphs of very detailed city/subdivision info. But, the drudgery work is mostly automatic and easy to do, and my snippet ID, page url and page layout conventions are maintained throughout the site.

I hope this helps someone!

[Micheal Pannell Realtor]

Yeah that works.

[Discover Davis Homes]

Ronnie, sounds much better than what I've been doing, having multiple copies of the backend open at once. I don't think it means your lazy, but well organized. Thanks for sharing.