Hi,

I'm a new agent and I'm in the process of creating my website. I've read about the many advantages of using Wordpress to create a website, specifically around SEO, and therefore have chosen to go down this route. My question is how difficult is it to learn Wordpress? I do not have a technical background, aside from knowing how to use the typical Microsoft Office Applications - Excel, Powerpoint, Word etc. My goal is to be able to create a professional-looking website as well as be able to maintain it myself.

I would appreciate your thoughts and if you can share your own experience as well.

Thanks!

I am ahead of you by a few months, maybe 4 or 5. It was painless to begin. You should easily be able to get set up in one sitting. I know there is alot more I can learn. You will find plenty of threads and dozens upon dozens of helpful posts on the forum. Utilize the search feature to see what I mean. Good luck.

That's one of the many positives about Wordpress, the shallow learning curve. It doesn't take much to get started and the community is so active it's easy to access answers when you need them. Of course if you wanted to, you could really dig into Wordpress as well, learn all the php and MySQL technologies, but it's not a prerequisite.

If you want to know what Wordpress will look and act like before installing it on your own server, head over to Wordpress.com and sign up for a free account - what you see there will be nearly identical to how WP looks on your server.


We offer a few real estate specific free guides, check out signature for the links.

I just found that Wordpress has a forum rich with threads on working through the kinks. I imagine you could find answers to all of your questions there.

Thanks for sharing your experience Doin bpose. Are you happy with what you've created so far? Does it look like a professionally created website?

RT - thanks for your input. I've actually signed-up and opened an account with wordpress. My first impression is that there's a ton of info I need to absorb, I guess nothing good comes free and I've got my work cut out for me.

http://rrjank.wordpress.com/

There is the link if you want to check it out. No, it does not look like a professional website, but it serves some function for me. I use it to publisize some listings with an extra umpff. I use it to stay in front of my facebook people. I stay outside of RE with some of my topics so I don't barage people with business. It is in the fetal stages to be sure. I would check out some of the other big bloggers, like Perky. My traffic is certainly on the climb though. Each month it is larger. I get comments back from people in person, so I think it is accomplishing what I want it to do. I want to stay in front of my people and remind them who I am and what I do. That reminder might simply be the word REMAX at the end of a humor post I made. I do not blast every RE task I do like some agents do.

I have blended FB into this thread, sorry if I confused you.

The key to building a cost effective Wordpress website is finding the right theme, here's a couple sites I've worked on to show you what can be done with Wordpress:

http://showappeal.com/ Heavy theme customization
http://www.azsearchforhomes.com/ Minor theme customization

[quote=Doin' bpose][quote=Steely Dan]Thanks for sharing your experience Doin bpose. Are you happy with what you've created so far? Does it look like a professionally created website?
[/quote]


[url=http://rrjank.wordpress.com/]http://rrjank.wordpress.com/[/url]

There is the link if you want to check it out. No, it does not look like a professional website, but it serves some function for me. I use it to publisize some listings with an extra umpff. I use it to stay in front of my facebook people. I stay outside of RE with some of my topics so I don't barage people with business. It is in the fetal stages to be sure. I would check out some of the other big bloggers, like Perky. My traffic is certainly on the climb though. Each month it is larger. I get comments back from people in person, so I think it is accomplishing what I want it to do. I want to stay in front of my people and remind them who I am and what I do. That reminder might simply be the word REMAX at the end of a humor post I made. I do not blast every RE task I do like some agents do.

I have blended FB into this thread, sorry if I confused you. [/quote]

Look pretty good to me. Did you use any other tool aside from Wordpress (e.g. dreamweaver)? Did you build this using a theme you purchased? Also curious why you're not having it hosted yet with a provider like Bluehost?

[quote=RTChris][quote=Steely Dan]RT - thanks for your input. I've actually signed-up and opened an account with wordpress. My first impression is that there's a ton of info I need to absorb, I guess nothing good comes free and I've got my work cut out for me.[/quote]

The key to building a cost effective Wordpress website is finding the right theme, here's a couple sites I've worked on to show you what can be done with Wordpress:

[url]http://showappeal.com/[/url] Heavy theme customization
[url]http://www.azsearchforhomes.com/[/url] Minor theme customization [/quote]

Looks pretty cool - even the one with minor customization. I'll ask you the same question I asked Doin dpose - what other tools did you use (e.g. Dreamweaver) to create these websites?

Thanks!

Steely, actually the only code editor I use is Dreamweaver, although you can use Coda (Mac only) as a less expensive program, and TextWrangler (Mac only) as a free program.

Otherwise my primary host is HostGator - been pleased with them so far.

I also use Transmit (Mac only) as my FTP client to upload and download things from the server. Very cool software indeed.

There is a steep learning curve in mastering WordPress, but due to its functionality and SEO juice, it's well worth putting the time/effort (specially when compared to the options, which are typically considerably more costly).

When setting up a Wordpress account in order to blog, is one better off to use their own domain name or the wordpress domain? I have a domain name but wanted to use that on my official website when I get it. I'm not really sure how all this works. I am assuming that eventually I will have a website where I will put a link on the website to my Wordpress blog. Is this correct or can the Wordpress Blog be changed into my actual website when I become a realtor?

In my opinion, it is better to have ultimate control over your blog which is why you should have it on your own server - most webhosts these days automatically include a WP option. This way you have utter and complete control over your content all of the time.

WP can be tricky, not terribly hard if you have some coding experince w/ CSS, but the easiest thing to do to get started is to pick a template that you like and use it for your entire site.

If you do not have any experience w/ coding, it would probably be well worth your $$ to hire someone (who really knows what they are doing) to set it up for you. You really should not start until you have your license. You can start writing blogs now and saving them on your computer - then you will have a whole slew to get started and you can begin blogging with the ability to churn out 2 posts a week.

It's better to do it correctly NOW, before you get too busy, or you'll end up like me, trying to squeeze it in while handling closings and customers and other issues that come with being a busy agent.

[quote=Perky_REALTOR]In my opinion, it is better to have ultimate control over your blog which is why you should have it on your own server - most webhosts these days automatically include a WP option. This way you have utter and complete control over your content all of the time.

WP can be tricky, not terribly hard if you have some coding experince w/ CSS, but the easiest thing to do to get started is to pick a template that you like and use it for your entire site.

If you do not have any experience w/ coding, it would probably be well worth your $$ to hire someone (who really knows what they are doing) to set it up for you. You really should not start until you have your license. You can start writing blogs now and saving them on your computer - then you will have a whole slew to get started and you can begin blogging with the ability to churn out 2 posts a week. :)

It's better to do it correctly NOW, before you get too busy, or you'll end up like me, trying to squeeze it in while handling closings and customers and other issues that come with being a busy agent. [/quote]

Thanks for chiming in Perky - I hear you're the wordpress queen of this discussion board ;). I'll give it a try and if I find it too complicated and/or I get to the point were I get too busy, I might just outsource this task. As you suggested, I am planning on writing content for my website now and go live when I actually get my license.

I'm assuming the websites in your signature were all created using Wordpress?

OMG no. BLOGGING, I am pretty sharp with. Worpress...well I ain' tno queen. LOL

Well one of my blogs is a WP.com blog. I like that one. It works like it's supposed to! LOL. I am trying to do WP.org on my site now, and all seemed to be going well, I was customizing and all of that, but there is something screwed up on my server - either the database is corrupted or something, and I can't get anything to work. LOL. I'm about ready to delete the whole darn thing, give my new design to someone who specializes in WP, and just fork over the $$$ and be done with it.

Wordpress is a pleasure to use compared to the other content management systems out there. It's also very flexible and powerful. There are plugins for just about anything you can imagine you might want to add to your website.

Question for you all.
You blog about a listing.
Listing sells.
Do you delete the post?
Do you modify the post to indicate the sale?
Do you leave it be and let it attract leads?

Thanks.

I have just turned in my 7th month of increased traffic. I am now to about 10 hits a day. I imagine those are low numbers to many of you. I am still new to this. I post about once a week. mostly real estate stuff, such as listings. But I give RE advice, and provide access to information I think is important. I also do non RE posts.

Three Wordpress questions that remain for me...1) I have issues posting multiple photos in my blogs. They seem to overlap sometimes.

2) At what traffic levels is it worth it to begin to seek advertisers.

3)What do you do with posts for sold listings? Delete, update or let be.

The Inside Track on Virginia Real Estate

Wordpress sites are simple to set up. Quite frankly once you learn how to use them you will not look back. So many plug ins and themes to choose from. There are also themes you can purchase which I recommend unless you like to tweak code yourself or create your own themes.

For example - [url=http://usda102.org]Oakley CA Homes for Sale[/url] about Oakley Ca real estate, foreclosure, usda loans, oakley ca listings, etc..

It based on a wordpress theme. Revisions are currently underway as we consider color schemes, font type and so forth to enrichen the user's experience while they are on the site.

Wordpress is easy to learn to use. There are plenty of tutorials on the net you can read. There are many plugins and themes which are helpful. As you learn to use WP you'll find out how nice it is to add content easily. You can buy a nice theme or use a free one.

we are also using Wordpress. It seems its very popular with Google as well and that helps a lot to our main website.

WP is super easy to use! I just did my site with it, and would recommend anyone to give it a try. I did hire someone to customize a template that I bought, but in the end it cost me less than $300 for a fully cusotmized site that I was really happy with and that I can maintain myself.

Really depends on how in depth you want to get with learning it. The basic set-up and use is pretty easy as websites go and their large community ensures things are pretty up-to-date. However, Wordpress can start getting fairly complex if you delve into actual development of websites around their framework...but if your just using their backend technology, then ya, fairly easy

This program http://nicheblitzkrieg.net/ by michael brown is awesome cost about 100 bucks for the program. It is for someone new to wordpress and SEO. It lays it for you step by step. I started this site 3 months ago.
www.saskhomesforsale.org

wordpress is open source so here you only need to learn how to use wordpress theme and change it according to your requirement which require few month learning to do that

It's not too difficult, but I'd recommend finding someone that can help if you're new to it. You can find someone hourly, and fairly cheap through websites like odesk.com, that can help with setup, configuration, and any questions you have.

It's definitely better to have your wordpress blog on your own domain versus a WP.org domain. Wordpress is only going to become more dominant in real estate and, as more agents become tech savvy, we're going to see countless parallel blogs by the same agent. If you're going to hire someone to build your site, I wouldn't pay anything over 2k. It's not hard to set up a wordpress blog and customize it with CSS.

I would also not create blog under someone else's domain as a subdomain. In the end, it's just building content for the domain.

I am not sure what you mean by "learn" Wordpress.
If you just want to learn how to create new posts and add content to the website, it should not be very difficult.
If you want to install it, and create your own custom look with your own design, you are looking at a lot to learn. I don't recommend you to try to become a programmer, but it makes sense for you to learn the user interface so you can make content updates to your own website.

Wordpress is fairly easy learn to post to your blog and write pages given you use existing templates. But to learn how to modify the template or change a design requires technical know how and can take a while if you are not technically savvy. There is also Joomla and you can purchase pre-built real estate templates to use with it.
Someone here mentioned they paid $300 to customize a WordPress template to fit your needs, mind sharing who you used?

Wordpress is the most easiest thing to learn. You just have the little knowledge about the technical things which you will sure learn easily and quickly.

WordPress at a beginner level is not very difficult and is extremely intuitive. You can have a decent looking site up and running very quickly.

However, it boils down to the features you want to implement. Coding may be needed in order to make your own specific theme (even though there are plenty of good ones that are free), insert specific features, etc.

Google wordcamp and find one in your area. I have been to a couple of wordcamps and they are a fantastic way to really learn about WP. So many people that work on WP sites share so much at wordcamp well worth the $20 or so they charge to get in.

[quote=SaltspringRE]Google wordcamp and find one in your area. I have been to a couple of wordcamps and they are a fantastic way to really learn about WP. So many people that work on WP sites share so much at wordcamp well worth the $20 or so they charge to get in. [/quote]

It's the first time I hear about Wordcamp, but it sounds very nice indeed.

I was in the same boat about 5 months ago. Like everyone is stating, learning Wordpress and how it works is easy. However, understanding the full gamut of plugins, which plugins are best, and how to effectively integrate those plugins can be a real pain. I found that I ended up uploading countless plugins just to experiment and I ended up wasting a lot of time. If I were to recommend off the bat for someone starting out, it would be these:

- Simple Real Estate Pack (SREP)
- Disqus (although I've heard Google has a hard time of crawling these comments)
- Related Posts (YARPP)
- W3 Total Cache: I would recommend setting up a CDN through Amazon but avoiding CloudFlare
- FB Tab Settings: you can setup pages for your FB page in your site so your FB page doesn't look like garbage.
- XML-Sitemap and then submit the sitemap through Webmasters.

[quote=BillW]I was in the same boat about 5 months ago. Like everyone is stating, learning Wordpress and how it works is easy. However, understanding the full gamut of plugins, which plugins are best, and how to effectively integrate those plugins can be a real pain. I found that I ended up uploading countless plugins just to experiment and I ended up wasting a lot of time. If I were to recommend off the bat for someone starting out, it would be these:

- Simple Real Estate Pack (SREP)
- Disqus (although I've heard Google has a hard time of crawling these comments)
- Related Posts (YARPP)
- W3 Total Cache: I would recommend setting up a CDN through Amazon but avoiding CloudFlare
- FB Tab Settings: you can setup pages for your FB page in your site so your FB page doesn't look like garbage.
- XML-Sitemap and then submit the sitemap through Webmasters. [/quote]

And of course, All in One SEO Pack + a contact form plugin + Akismet.

I LOVE Wordpress. I'm just about to get my license, and have already started a blog for RE.

I think there can be a lot of confusion about how to do it, and how to do it right.

Basically there are three parts to proper Wordpress-ing

1) Writing posts - This is as simple as thinking of a Title, and writing a short article

2) Templates - The way your Wordpress blog looks it totally independent of the stuff you write. Your theme, is the way your blog looks to the world. You can get a free one, pay for a premium one, hire someone to design a custom one, or DIY it yourself

3) SEO - Right out of the gate, Wordpress has some great features that make it easily indexed by the major search engines. But there is all kinds of tweaking you can do (like getting your own domain name).

I've found that you want to do #2 once. Do #1 everyday. And check #3 about once a month.

What do you want to learn in wordpress ? It's famous for five minutes installation .. everything is easy.

Here's the scoop, even though people tell you that Wordpress is a cinch to install and use, if you don't have much of an acumen towards website building and theme manipulation, it still may seem like Greek once you get it set up. I've worked with a drop and drag theme which utilizes wordpress. It makes things MUCH easier. And your site will look less "cookie cutter" as well. The company is called Page Lines and the drag and drop theme that I used was Platform Pro. If anyone tried wordpress and saw that it was a little too "techy" for them, try this avenue instead.

I don't feel it is that complicated to learn. However, you are using an "Open Source" software which can become vulnerable for hacking.