May 10, 2017

Back in February when I first launched my business I wrote an informative blog post titled 6 Examples of Fantastic Facebook Pages by Windsor Real Estate Agents. The post received a ton of traffic via various sources including organic search and my newsletter but where it really took off was on social media. The post received over 130+ shares on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter and even though it’s been two months since I posted it, it still remains my most visited blog.

One of the people who saw the post on social media was Windsor real estate agent Carmen Sandu. About a week after I shared the post, Carmen contacted me inquiring about how I might be able to help her with her digital marketing presence. We setup a call and after a few short meeting to discuss strategy, we got started on the project. The project involves several phases including social media, content marketing and ad purchasing but first we had to build Carmen a well-designed and user-friendly website.

Homepage

In the initial discovery meetings we discussed what type of look and feel the website should have. It had to be something clean, crisp, inviting and reflective of Carmen’s personality. We ended up finding a pre-designed WordPress theme called “Hometown” that was both easy to use and completely on-brand with our vision for Carmen’s website. The theme features a scrolling homepage design that includes sections for a featured content slider, home listings and a brief “About Carmen” section which leads to the full biography on the “About” page.

DDF Integration

One of my favourite aspects of the website is the integration of the DDF Plugin to pull home listings directly from Realtor.com. Admittedly, DDF Integration was something I knew nothing about prior to getting started with Carmen’s project but as the project progressed and Carmen introduced me to it, I grew to appreciate its flexibility and customization.

For those of you unfamiliar with the term, DDF Integration is a service made available and provided by the Canadian Real Estate Association to realtors to make the process of sharing, editing and removing home listings incredibly simple. With DDF Integration, realtors are only required to add their listings to Realtor.com and then can link seamlessly to those listings from their website. When a listing is added, edited or removed from Realtor.com, it’s automatically removed from the website as well.

For Carmen’s DDF Integration I worked with developers from London, Ontario who created a plugin called RealtyPress. The plugin was incredibly easy to integrate with Carmen’s website theme allowing me to easily change colors, formats, fonts and basically anything else I wanted regarding the home listings. From sales to support, the RealtyPress team was very responsive to any request and I’d highly recommend using them for your next DDF Integration.

Photography

Other than Carmen’s biography photo all of the photography for the website comes from stock photo provider iStock. Photo selection was a team effort between Carmen and myself to find photos that would fit best with the brand. Rather than do the typical real estate content slider with photos of home exteriors, we chose to feature home interiors and home buyers to make the website more personal and welcoming.

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Working with Carmen has been a really fun experience. Not only has she trusted me to make the right decisions along the way but she’s also provided her insight and thoughts from her years of real estate experience. I look forward to moving on to the next phase of the project… stay tuned!