Some of Arizona’s most Successful Agents call John Hall & Associates home.

Tag Archive: Wordpress

WordPress for REALTORS®: Contact Form 7

by on Apr 6, 2011 | Careers and Training, Real Estate News, REALTOR® Marketing, Technology


Free and flexible. That’s why I like the Contact Form 7 plugin for WordPress. Building custom real estate forms requires working with the contact form shortcode. To make creating these forms a little bit easier, I’d like to share the code from our buying a home and selling a house contact forms. Feel free to to use them on your real estate web site.

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Friday Lunch and Learn: WordPress Square One

by on Mar 16, 2011 | Careers and Training, Company News, REALTOR® Marketing, Technology

Wordpress LogoWordPress is a free, yet powerful web site platform that has been making significant traction in the real estate industry. Agents and Brokers have been building their real estate web sites with wordpress because of the low cost, ease of use, search engine optimization, and the endless customizations that can be made.

This Friday’s techno lunch and learn at PV will be about setting up a WordPress web site from the beginning. Starting from scratch. If you would like to join us, you are more than welcome. Bring your laptop – it’s hands on learning.

Many thanks to Bryan Jones of Clear Title and Stacey Gross of Old Republic Home Protection for their continued support of our technology lunch and learns.

If you’re in, RSVP to psexton@johnhall.com – there is no requirement that you have to be a member of the John Hall family to join us. All are welcome.

Phoenix WordCamp: Geniuses Sharing Expertise

by on Feb 1, 2011 | Technology

Phoenix WordCamp
For people not exposed to the web site publishing platform WordPress, WordCamp may sound like something for etymologists.  However, if you’re one of the users that has helped get the WordPress 3.0 downloads over 31 million, then you probably know WordCamp is less about comparative linguistics and more about web presence.  WordCamp is a technology conference focused on the uber-popular content management system, WordPress (the system we use to run JohnHall.com).

Friday: Multisites, BuddyPress, and Side Conversations

Wordpress LogoMultisites is a feature in WordPress 3.0 that has the ability to create a network of web sites with just one install. I really like this concept and think there is huge potential to have multisites power agent web sites at this Arizona real estate agency.  I’ve been thinking about how an individual REALTOR® would/could use it and my thoughts have evolved. Some ideas discussed were single property web sites or neighborhood web sites, but the more I learn about custom post types the more I think both those ideas can be done without multisites. What do you think? How are you using them or thinking about using them?

BuddyPress is a plugin (software that enhances the core WP platform) that flips a web site’s focus from the content to the user.  It allows users to create groups, connect with friends, and find other users with similar interests.  I’ve heard it described as a tool that turns WP into more of a social networking site.  I listened to the presentation, but was thinking if we ever decide to use BuddyPress at John Hall & Associates it will be so far down the road (in internet time) that the usability and features will most likely be different. Agents, however, could use this to build/enhance a community website. It’s not an idea for the novice geek, you’d have to much closer to a black-diamond geek to pull it off successfully.

Child ThemesMy favorite side conversation from Friday was with Dave Smith, a REALTOR® in Tucson.  Dave explained to me the concept of child themes in WordPress. If you’re hacking a theme in WordPress to change the colors, fonts, spacing, layout, header, or whatever – child themes will protect your changes from theme updates. Way cool.

Not real sure Dr. Evil and Mini-me are the best image to use, but once it was in the post I couldn’t bring myself to remove it.

Saturday: Main Conference Day

After listening to the opening remarks (Why yes, they did include a live mariachi band.  Funny you should ask.) I attended a presentation on A/B Testing.  Mitcho showed off one of his plugins called Shrimp Test.  Shrimp Test allows you to A/B test words in pages or posts. Let’s say that within a paragraph on your site you have a link that says ‘Search Phoenix Homes For Sale’, but you think ‘FREE Phoenix Home Search’ might get more clicks.  A/B TestingUsing Shrimp Test, you can click an icon in the page editor screen and add a variant.  WordPress will alternate ‘Search Phoenix Homes for Sale’ and ‘FREE Phoenix Home Search’ for new users to your site and record the results.  Once you’re happy with the confidence level of the test, pick the phrase that works better. Pretty cool that it’s possible to do this all within WP.

WordPress SecurityUp next was a user security session.  If you’re the admin person for your WP site check out their slideshare presentation below.  Dre Armeda and Brad Williams are awesome for sharing such useful information. Because I am highly skeptical of any security advice I find on the web, I was stoked that these guys were apart of the camp. Sharing tips live on stage to a room full of savvy users brings a ton of credibility in my book.

WordPress End-User Security
View more presentations from Dre Armeda.

While I was learning about how not to share JohnHall.com FTP privileges with the world, Jay Thompson gave a presentation on converting web traffic that received excellent reviews.  He gets bonus points for using prezi.com.

TypographyOne thing I didn’t expect WordCamp to do was to help me realize I how little I know about typography. Chelsea Otakan used words to describe CSS classes that I didn’t know existed. Sheltered? Yup. Tracking = letter-spacing. Leading = line-height. Who knew? I had to google kerning. Anyway, my take-aways:

  • FONTS SET THE TONE OF YOUR CONTENT. (See?)
  • Don’t use similar but different fonts on the same page, it’s confusing to the eye.

By this point in my WordCamping trip I had absorbed about as much as I could. I went to some other presentations, but couldn’t think about anything other than the security measures, font changes, and multisites w/ child themes that I was going to work on back in the office.

A few last tidbits that stuck:

A huge THANK YOU to the volunteers that put on the event. I really appreciate getting a chance to learn from the best in the industry.

We’re moving JohnHall.com to WordPress

by on Apr 28, 2010 | Company News, REALTOR® Marketing, Technology

logo by: koka_sexton

…which also means we are redesigning JohnHall.com.  It’s been a fun learning opportunity as we design and convert our existing website over to the self hosted wordpress platform. Our conversion date will be May 13th. Of course we expect it to be a smooth flip of the switch that only results in seconds of downtime. (sarcasm? sarcasm.)  Our goal is to minimize the downtime, we’re just not sure how long it will take.

The switch should not affect the Intranet system – it’s not changing.  During our conversion the intranet should still be available at JohnHall.com/intranet.

Special thanks to the flickr users that set their image licenses to Creative Commons.  We’re taking full advantage of your generosity and photo skills.  We will be paying attribution from our about page.

Many thanks to Superlative Real Estate Websites for agreeing to work with our design deadlines and powering the home search and agent roster.

If you’d like a sneak peak at the new site – we’re still working on it here.  If you’re wondering which WP theme we’re using – Headway.

Moral of the story, please be aware from May13-May 15 there may some dust (or falling beams) from our construction project at JohnHall.com.  Thanks again for your patience as we improve our web presence.

Phil Sexton & Bill Evans

Search Engine Optimizing Your WordPress

by on Nov 20, 2009 | REALTOR® Marketing, Technology

RE Barcamp San Diego session: WordPress SEO Tips and Tricks

This session was run by three guys that know a lot more about this stuff than I do. Bob Wilson was the one whose name I caught – and the one I got a chance to talk with more at the after barcamp bar.  The guy is definitely knowledgeable about search engine optimization.  Here are my notes from all three of the presenters…

  • Always use pictures in blog posts and make sure to label the pictures appropriately. Instead of uploading an image with filename IMG_8098.jpg and adding it to your post (or page) about Phoenix homes for sale. Rename it to something like Front-of-home-in-Phoenix.jpg. Google gives your file names credit – so you should name them appropriately.
  • When you rename your files, be sure to use hyphens or underscores to separate the words. One of the presenters said hyphens are good if you want google to read the words individually. Underscores are better for phrases.
  • Make sure to change your permalink structure. Permalinks are the URL or unique web address associated with each individual blog post. By default, wordpress sets them to use the post ID which is numerical and provides no value to google. Instead, go into the Settings (from the Admin panel), click Permalinks and choose an option that includes the title of the post. He said there was no real google value to have the date and recommends the custom option which allows you to remove it.
  • Some themes allow you to add a meta-description to each post – if yours does, use it every time. The meta description is what will show up in google 9 times out of 10. Plus it’s another opportunity to use keyword variations associated with the specific post.  You can be more specific and more accurate – search engines (and readers) like specific, accurate descriptions!
  • As for the title of your blog – they do not recommend using an image for the entire header. You can set an image to the background, but they say have your text title overlay on top of the image for maximum SEO benefit.
  • Ready to talk heading tags? Like h1, h2, and h3? One presenter said he tags the first sentence of each post with h2 tags. Then if he has sub-headers within a post he uses h3. Google scans header tags first to see what the page is about. This is documented in Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide (free PDF) and well worth the read if you are trying to get your website to show up higher in search results.
  • A tangent on design – set a static page as your homepage. So many authors keep their blogs as the homepage because they are proud of the articles they write.  Some may think that’s what their visitors care most about, but if your goal is to create leads, you should have a static page with a crystal clear way to search for homes, get market statistics, and some way for them to figure out what their home is worth. Widget Me was a recommended plug-in.
  • Some themes allow you to choose noindex for archive pages and category pages – this is a good idea to avoid duplicate content penalties. However, if your category pages show excerpts instead of full-posts and you write unique excerpts for each post (not auto-generated or first paragraph copy and pasted) then you can allow google to index those pages because there is no duplicate content. If that makes no sense, set your category pages to noindex.  Regardless of noindex, it’s recommended to add a content block to the top of the each of the category pages explaining more about the … category.

Thesis was the most recommended wordpress theme, Headway followed.

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