Real Estate Marketing & Beyond
Earlier this month, Placester released a brand new real estate theme that should fit the needs of today’s tech-savvy real estate agents looking to gain an edge. Being called Plymouth, what makes this new real estate theme special is that it’s Placester’s first fully responsive real estate website design.
In case you’re a bit behind when it comes to some of the latest advancements in website technology, responsive design websites are the answer to giving today’s internet users and home buyers searching the web on mobile devices a better browsing and navigating experience. Should someone reach your website using a smart phone or tablet for example, rather than having your entire site shrink down to fit the screen of these smaller devises, a responsive design website will automatically adjust a site’s content depending on the device and screen size in which you’re using to access the site. So in other words, how your website appears on an iPhone or iPad may be somewhat different given the variance in screen size or position you’re holding such device.
With the emergence of Zillow Premier Agent websites and numerous other real estate web companies offering state-of-the-art website products, it seems as if many real estate professionals in the business have really gotten away from using other WordPress themes for their business websites. But if you’re comfortable using WordPress and aren’t content using a Premier Agent site from Zillow, the Plymouth theme may not only be the solution for your real estate business, but the best option currently available.
Along with being a responsive design website, the Plymouth theme has full IDX capability and offers some quality search engine optimization features that many other real estate WordPress themes simply don’t have. As noted on the theme’s description page, every Placester website will automatically create a landing page for each property listing and neighborhood in your local MLS, which not only is beneficial for SEO purposes, but for the user experience as well. Other notable attributes include natural language property URLs, keyword tagging, and website sitemaps that are also indexed by search engines.
For more information on the Placester Plymouth real estate theme, visit Placester.com or check out the Plymouth theme page here.
Not a bad Real Estate theme at all (I checked the Plymouth theme page) but I am just wondering what are the benefits of this IDX over WordPress. Any thoughts on that? I am not really familiar with IDX and although you mention IDX has SEO advantages over WordPress, you do not really mention them. Or maybe there is something I didn't understand?
Jack, Your in the right direction. IDX is the data format for handling listing data and thats not something that WordPress has built in. WordPress is awesome for many things and in our opinion, one of the best CMS's out there. Choosing the right IDX or listing data solution is crucial if you want to market real estate on the web. In the past, most of the solutions were iFramed, meaning they couldn't be index'd by the search engines. We've built a framework on WordPress that allows us to serve up listing data in a search/SEO friendly way. unique natural language urls for each listing in your MLS, landing pages are auto generated for every listing and neighborhood in the mls, and then there's all of the optimization that you can do in the admin panel to make it search friendly for your specific geographic area and keyword. Hope that answers your questions. Seth