History

My DenverHomeValue.com domain and website has been in existence since I returned to the Denver area in 2004, but it has gone through a number of changes in design and functionality as new technologies, and my ability to take advantage of them, have improved.

Feb 2004 – June 2007: Basic Point2Agent template website with My Buying Buddy, a very strong and feature rich IFramed IDX with great back end lead management capabilities. This configuration was easy to manage and great for supporting consumers, but it was relatively poor at search engine SEO factors. Buying leads and paying for AdWords PPC got to be very expensive, so an alternative needed to be found, and I thought I had found it.

July 2007 – March 2008: Basic Real Estate Webmasters (REW) template website, with same My Buying Buddy IFramed IDX. Sticking with the Buying Buddy IDX was not the original plan, but it was discovered that REW’s MetroList IDX was not as ready to “plug and play”  as we all had thought. It needed lots more development work to improve functionality and achieve valid “vendor template” approval from MetroList. Still, it was a major a step up for future SEO factors, and my users were still happpy with the IDX and stayed on the site. Unfortunately, it also meant that my AdWords PPC expenses were not going away as quickly as I had hoped.

March 2008 – June 2009: Same basic REW template, with a few minor enhancements, plus the newly approved and integrated REW IDX. Unfortunately, the user experience of the limited functionality of the REW IDX was not all that great out of the box, as compared to the very rich and user friendly features of Buying Buddy. New users rarely came back over time to do their searches, meaning lots of lost business. In internet terms, despite a few relatively minor improvements to the IDX, the site was just not as “sticky” as the previous configuration. On the other hand, search engine / SEO factors were great, so I was able to attract more visitors without buying leads. REW was technically capable, but was constrained in its ability to change the IDX by MetroList rules. And, based on REW’s “custom design and programming by the hour” business model, any custom work could also be very expensive for the limited number of their Denver area template clients to absorb. There had to be a better way.

July 2009 – Present: Joomla 1.5 “open source” CMS (Content Management System) with integrated IDX by Ultimate IDX, plus a WordPress sub-domain for blogging, all “skinned” to replicate the core website’s theme and colors. See “My Blog” on the top menu to see the WP blog in action. Ultimate IDX already had open source website experience, primarily with WordPress,  and a strong lead management backend component, but they were new to the Denver market, so we were able to design the IDX user interface from scratch, with what I think are pretty good results.

Current Technical Specifications

Looking at the completed list below just reinforces in my mind that I must have been crazy to even attempt it! The technical challenges have been daunting, but successful. However, this is not a project that I would recommend to the average real estate agent or even a technically sophisticated brokerage.

Joomla 1.5 CMS configured with standard Joomla 1.5 SEF enabled, “legacy” mode disabled, and with the following additional commercial and open source components / plug-ins:

Ultimate IDX: Not really a Joomla plugin or module, but very tightly integrated with the same domain name and urls of the core website. This is really a highly customized version of their newest core product, not even fully out of development yet. I participated actively and contributed quite a lot of hours into its development and refinement for the Denver MetroList market, from a design and Joomla integration standpoint.  The management and developers at UIDX have been super supportive so far, and we only have a small number of relatively minor issues to address, mostly in the area of additional search options and capabilities, plus making it easier to implement for their future MetroList clients in a way that is fully MetroList compliant.

Rocket Themes  Affinity (July 2009) Template for Joomla 1.5: Modified by me for integration of SuperFish menu and a few minor color adjustments, and with fixes for minor template rendering bugs, especially in IE, but otherwise pretty much vanilla as delivered by The Rocket Themes folks. The template as delivered includes source ordered html layout, meaning it has better SEO factors than many templates. Left and right side menu code loaded after the main menu and content pane, putting the main content near the top of the page as far as the search engine web crawlers see it.

XMAP: A plugin component that automatically generates an xml sitemap for Google and other search engines, based on the Joomla menu structures. It also generates a user-friendly and complete site map url that I link to from my menu and footer text.

JIncludes: A plugin component that supports most of what I call a “snippet library”, for html, php and javascript functions. The number of library snippets that JIncludes supports may seem somewhat limited compared to REW’s snippet technology, but it is also significantly enhanced by the ability to pass parameters to the library snippet, a suggestion that I had made to REW at one point, but I don’t think ever went anywhere. This allows four generic JIncludes snippets with parameters to do the job that took 200+ individual REW snippets to accomplish.

DirectPHP: A plugin component that allows PHP and other code to be directly embedded in page content, greatly enhancing the ability to do custom programming on a page-by-page basis. Potentially dangerous in the hands of a novice, so I use it very sparingly, and carefully!

ALFContact, paired with BigO Captcha, for flexible generation of multiple configurable and spam-free “Contact” forms. The contact forms themselves are pretty basic, but the ability to attach them to other page content allows them to be used in many creative ways.

Joomla Content Editor (JCE): A content editor  component that is a significant improvement over the basic TinyMCE editor that comes with Joomla 1.5. It allows me to attach a customized subset of my site’s theme template to the editor, and get a true “WYSIWYG” experience, plus the ability to apply my own custom styles in the content without having to resort to the html edit mode. In this way, I get an almost MS Word type of editor capability. It also allows me to paste in content originally created in Word, and handles cleaning it up to html standards pretty well.

eXtplorer: A file management component that allows me to perform nearly all ftp type functions from withing the Joomla environment, and also operates as a secure free-standing website file management tool, if you know how to get to and log in at its secured folder.

SuperFish Menu: A menu module that uses the Joomla standard menus to allow me to build the “drop down” and “slide out” menus you see on my core site. Customizing the SuperFish css to work properly and look good with my current theme’s template was a challenging and interesting experience! Here on my WP blog site, I use another tool for the equivalent functionality, to be described later.

JoomPack: This backup component provides a quick and easy way to backup my site’s MySQL database, its files, or both, all in one easy step, or with a nightly cron job. Having these backups has been a life saver in the past for my genealogy website, also based on Joomla 1.5.

That pretty well completes the current list. But I am curreently looking at and playing with a number of other components that should prove useful. One is a download component that will allow me to offer secure upload/download folders for my buyer and seller clients, so we can manage and share transaction files, like pdfs of contracts and addendums, all online.  Another is an enhanced top menu, with fancier graphics and transitions. Others are connected with some of the advanced theme templates I am evaluating, and could be the next major step in the evolution of this site.

I am very interested in your comments about this site, and how I may be able to improve it, both technically and from a consumer / user standpoint. Please post your feedback below.