Local Search Marketing

Recently finished work on Blackbird Homes, a real estate company in St. Petersburg, Florida. I used WordPress as the Content Management System and the Homeowner Theme by Gorilla Themes.

The theme design is very clean and organized, but I was mainly impressed with how well the theme integrated with WordPress. You can add a listing as easily as you can add a blog post. The categories are used heavily to create search functionality, organize properties and distinguish between listings and blog posts.

The theme is user-friendly, including several useful plugins and 5 different color templates to choose from.

I could have built the entire site without any coding, but did tweak a few things on the sidebar, cascading style sheet and header.

The support forum at Gorilla themes has a lot of good information, the documentation available was easy to read and they responded to questions quickly.

The theme is scalable to allow multiple agents to have their own logins, post their own listings and have them displayed along with their agent profile.

I recommend this as a powerful, functional solution to a real estate website.

After spending a year and a half designing the website for my wife’s small business, I decided to delete the whole thing.

During those 18 months, I learned quite a bit about website design, search engine optimization and lead conversion. Enough to confidently delete the website and start over with WordPress.

I had originally built the site with WebsiteTonight from Godaddy and although I was very pleased with how the site looked, there were too many advantages to converting it:

I was able to have the blog and website all on one domain
WordPress is the best blogging software
The code for WordPress and frugaltheme is clean, fast and search engine friendly
The on-page search engine optimization is built in
I was able to install plugins to improve search rankings, such as All in one SEO Pack, Google XML sitemaps, Google Analytics for WordPress, and Yet another Related Posts
It is easy to add new content
Creation of categories and tags to improve search engine rankings
Installed good-looking web 2.0 contact form for lead conversion
Ability to interact, leave comments and subscribe to the site

The biggest obstacle is that you do not want your commercial business website to look like a blog. I decided to go with frugaltheme because it is easily customizable and has a minimalist design. I was able to create a static homepage and have the actual blog as the 4th page in. The layout is very simple including a basic description, contact form and testimonials. Take a look at how it turned out.

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photo by koka sexton

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