You go on your way and find a couple others you want to try out as well.You found half a dozen plugins that had updates so you updated them

Maybe a week goes buy and one day you notice something doesn’t look right.  Oh, something is missing. Or you find something funny out in the margins or at the foot of your site.  Where did that come from?  It must be a plugin, but which one?

Date Installed On Plugins

One thing I’ve been wanting for a long time is to have the date installed somewhere on the plugin screen.  Better yet, I’d like to be able to sort the plugins by date installed/updated.  This would let me do a better job of debugging what went wrong.  As it is now I’m left trying to remember which were added, which were updated and I start deactivating and testing.

Plugin Memorandum

A new plugin showed up on the dashboard today and it isn’t what I wanted but for the time being it is better than nothing.  It lets me put a memo on the plugin screen under the plugin.  I can now add a date activated or updated.  Leave notes about the configuration or anything about this plugin I want to remember for future reference.

From: Real Estate Blog Lab Plugin Memorandum

DS Mobile Script

Diverse Solutions has been rolling out a mobile script that you can install on your site to take your visitors to your search page directly to your DS mobile search page that you can configure from the DS  Control panel.  I love it.  Gives you total control over the mobile visitor and you can setup custom pages for them to see and a custom search for them to view etc.

Be careful how you install it.  The instructions on the control panel say to paste the code in the header of your site before the </head> tag.

What they don’t tell you is if you do that for the main site header.php it will take every visitor to your site no matter what page they are trying to access from their mobile device to your DS Mobile page.  EVERY SINGLE MOBILE VISITOR TO THE DS MOBILE PAGE.

Why?  because you put the script in your header.php file which is the beginning of ALL your pages not just your search page.

The Solution to installing DS Mobile on a WordPress Blog

The solution isn’t very hard if you know a little code and have FTP access to your site.

You have to create a custom page and header template for your DS Search page.

Here is a quick way to do that (I’m using the TwentyTen theme in this example).

1. Copy the header.php and page.php file from your theme directory to your computer.
2. rename the header file to be header-search.php
3. copy the DS Mobile script into that header-search.php
4. rename the page.php to search-page.php
5. Add the page template tag to the top of the search-page.php file
6. Change the call to the header to be the header search.php
7. Upload them to your theme folder
8. Open your Search page in the editor and use the new search page template

Sample Page Template code

/**
* Template Name: One column, no sidebar
*
* A custom page template without sidebar.
*
* The “Template Name:” bit above allows this to be selectable
* from a dropdown menu on the edit page screen.
*
* @package WordPress
* @subpackage Twenty_Ten
* @since Twenty Ten 1.0
*/

This is the one from the TwentyTen one column template   change the template name to Search Page

Change the header file call in the Search Page template

Close to the top of the page you will see:

get_header(); ?>

Change this to

get_header(search); ?>

Once these steps are done your visitors will only go to the DS mobile page for the search page and not every page or post on your site.

As with all site modifications, once you have completed these steps, test it by using your mobile device to access your site.

Don’t forget to configure the mobile page on your DS control panel, don’t just copy the script to your site.  Scroll down on that page and fill in the information you want to convey to your mobile search visitors.

From: Real Estate Blog Lab Diverse Solutions Mobile Script

It was simple, I rebuilt the menu in about 5 minutes and activated it for the sub-nav below the header image.  This experience caused a few hours of research on how to backup just the custom menus.  Not much out there on them.  A great plugin would be the ability to export and import custom menus.

I found one small post mentioning a conflict with All-In-One-SEO with custom menus causing them to disappear on update.  But I couldn’t verify this and I updated a few small sites with it still activated and had no difficulty.

The big guns have several custom menus and up to 70 pages in each.  I didn’t want to rebuild those menus.  Therefore here is what I did:

1. Backed up the entire database using SQLAdmin Export function.  I did the entire database and just the options table (that’s where the menus reside).
2. I updated all plugins
3. Updated the theme files
4. Deactivated all plugins
5. Ran the upgrade
6. Reactivated all plugins

Everything went of without a hitch.  All menus are there and functioning.

Take the recommended precautions (and don’t shortcut the process this time by leaving the plugins activated) and everything should upgrade without a hitch

When you reactivate the plugins, make sure you check your site.  If it doesn’t look right, deactivate the plugins again and start adding them back one at a time.

From: Real Estate Blog Lab WordPress 3.3 Let’s Do IT

You want people to contact you don’t you?  Well of course you do.  You want to plaster your email address all over your site in hope they will contact you “For All Their Real Estate Needs”. (Yes, that’s sarcasm).

But you want to make it easy for them so you make your email address click-able.  So you or your “Webguy” use the HTML command mailto: to make the link click-able.

However, there are two things you should be aware of before you do this:

Spam bots crawl sites looking to harvest email addresses

They look for “mailto:” and harvest email addresses so they can begin sending you offers by the thousands to enhance certain body parts.  Sell you drugs from Canada or invite you to “personal webcam chats” in Russia.

This is one of the reason we have contact forms that never display an email address, the contact come to you and you can respond accordingly.

Annoying as HELL

Well, it’s  not as bad as HELL but it really is annoying when a website opens my email client so I can send them an email message.  If you happen to be on a computer that isn’t yours and suddenly the email client is opened and you are viewing someone’s email messages. Even worse is when they don’t tell you the link is not to a site but instead mailto

With all that said, I still have clients that want those email addresses displayed and click-able.  Now there’s a nifty (yes, I said nifty) plugin that will encode the email address so Spam bots can’t read it and send you all those desirable offers.

Email Address Encoder

This plugin (Click Add New under plugins and search Email Address Encoder) is simple to use.

1. Install the plugin
2. Activate the plugin

That’s it, no settings or configuration.

Enter an email address in a page or post and then look at the page source.  You won’t find mailto: or the email address, instead just a lot of sweet gibberish.

Now it doesn’t solve the Annoying issue  (I really try to NOT piss off annoy my site visitors).  But if you are still stuck in the 70′s & 80′s way of embedding your email address believing this is “The Way” to effective lead capture . . .

From: Real Estate Blog Lab I Want My Email Address Clickable

Tool Tips are the right tool

Real Estate is no exception when it comes to having it’s own nomenclature.  We live inside the world of FSBO, REO, BINSR, SPDS, Active Capa, CMA, etc. and use these terms  on a daily basis.

Even something as simple as “Home Finder”  what does that mean?  It depends on how each of us is using that term.  For some it means: “We will set you up in the MLS to email you homes matching your criteria”  to others it means “Here is where you can search the MLS to find homes”

Tool tips provide valuable information to your visitors

We can add definitions on pages above the forms we want visitors fill out, but we know many don’t read, the just start at the “Name” field and go from there.

But, they have to get to that page first.  Meaning, they have to click on the tab, button, etc. before they can fill in the form.

This is where tool tips come in most handy.  Take the time to add the title attribute to your links to provide information on what this button, tab, etc means and where it will take them.

WordPress makes it easy.  When you add a link, fill in the title field.  If you are adding the link manually, then add the title attribute on the html tab.  (No you don’t have to be a code geek to do this)

I know you think it looks like Greek to you on the HTML tab.  Well it’s time to learn a little Greek.

Start hovering over the line below to see tool tips that tell you what each part of the link code does.

<a title="This is a tool-tip" href="http://www.realestatebloglab.com/"> The Real Estate Blog Lab </a>

Tool tips can help your bounce rate

It takes a few seconds to add the title=”What you want them to read when they hover over the button”.

This simple attribute can help tip-off your visitors before the click. It could also help your bounce rate because they won’t be so fast to click the back button realizing once they are on the page “This isn’t what I was looking for”

From: Real Estate Blog Lab Tool Tips to tip-off Your Visitors

Long lists of links can be visually distracting.  It reminds me of a line from “The Land of Point” Oblio and Arrow in one of their encounter come upon a sign.  ”A point in every direction is the same as no point at all”

Too many visible links in a sidebar are distracting.  A better approach is to title those links with a Master Label then use an accordion menu to drop down on hover or click.

Accordion Menus for Pretty Sidebars

The Jquery Accordion Menu  by Design Chemical works great for this.

The plugins works with WordPress custom menus.  Create your menu, when done switch to widgets and move a jquery accordion menu widget to the sidebar where you want it.  Configure the way it will work from the options list.  Select a theme (I’m using “Clean”) and save.

Customize the look of Accordion Menus

If you don’t like the exact way the menu looks, you can always open the plugin css files and make modifications.  (If you do back them up so you don’t wipe them out one sleepy evening when updating all your plugins)

To the right (as of this posting anyway, it is gone now) you will see  Interesting Stuff  under the label Lab Favorites.  The menu is using this plugin to display posts and categories placed in a custom menu and displayed with Jquery Accordion Menu.

There’s no need to fill you sidebars with row after row of links, instead consider installing the Jquery Accordion Menu plugin.

BTW, Design Chemical has a plethora (always wanted to use that word here in the lab) of various menu plugins for your sidebars.  Ex. Take a look at the Vertical Mega Menu .  Anyone geeky enough to put all your listings with thumbnails in a Mega Menu?

From: Real Estate Blog Lab Jquery Accordion Menu for Neat Sidebars

Not all browsers will render (IE) the text-shadow.  But for the ones that do, it adds a little emphasis to the text.  So the next time you need to use the phrase shadow inventory just throw it in a span and have fun.

<span>style=”text-shadow: 2px 3px 5px #666666;”>SHADOW INVENTORY</span>

From: Real Estate Blog Lab Shadow Inventory Just for fun

Now seems to be the season of SEO companies to be hitting contact forms on blogs websites everywhere.

The message is simple and usually worded the same.

Want more traffic to your website . . . .

I get about a dozen of these a week. And I have a bold sentence at the top of my contact forms that clearly states:

If you are an SEO company please don’t bother filling in the Contact form.

But they can’t read:  How are they going to increase traffic to my site if they can’t read?

Please Pay Attention Here

If you are using Gmail like I am, the temptation is to report them as spam.  BUT WAIT.

They used your contact form.  The email actually comes from your site, Not from them.

Toss that email into the Google “Report as Spam” and it is YOUR SITE that you are reporting as a spammer.

Do you really want auto responder emails that go out from you to potential clients when they fill in your contact, CMA, Home Finder, Relocation Package request form to end up in their spam folder?

I didn’t think so.

Delete them.  But don’t “Report as Spam”

Just a tip from the Logic Bowl.

Dave

From: Real Estate Blog Lab Think before you spam that email

I’m recommending this plugin to all my clients using NextGen Gallery.

I especially like the way it shows listing photos.

Once installed there is top level admin navigation to the scroll gallery settings.  I slowed the top slideshow to 0.3  and for my theme set the width and height to 680px X 520px  You can easily configure it to fit any post area which makes it very flexible for about any theme.

Everything is pretty straight forward.  There are three default skins to chose from.  If you want to modify the css you will need to do it from FTP as the css is in a folder not accessible from the plugin editor.

Here is a typical gallery insert in a post.

Now here it is again using NextGen Scoll Gallery.  Click on any scrolling image or on the large image to advance to the next image.

From: Real Estate Blog Lab NextGen Scroll Gallery

The Exception to the rule on In-line Styles

I’ll admit, they are tempting to use.  I find myself using them more in html widgets than anywhere else for emphasis.  Sometimes in a post if I want something to stand out or possible serve as a quick example.  Like my last post where I did an in-line style for a blockquote with a font size, color, weight change for emphasis.  So I won’t say there is never a good time to use in-line styles in your pages and posts.

I also like to use <hr /> to add a line and break out a section on a post, but that typically will have no effect on a theme change.

In-line Styles Should Never be a Substitute

Here is what I’m finding on some clients sites.  They don’t know how to make a change to the style.css file.  But they do know a little html and how to style inline on the html tab of the editor.  Instead of fixing the style sheet they add an inline style directly into their post to accomplish their goal.

However, here’s the reason you don’t want to use in-line styles.  I’m currently working on a site where to overcome margin spacing for images in posts they used inline styles.  On some post I’m finding ( style=”margin:8px” )  on others it is (style=”margin-left:8px; margin-right:8px;”)  This got them the spacing they needed from the text (which the theme author failed to add in the theme’s style sheet)

Now, they are updating their site, with a new theme, a theme that does include styling for images in posts.  A theme that also uses some CSS3 styles to add a border and shadow.  A theme that by default uses 12px for the margin to allow room for the styles.

But guess what?  The in-line styles override the stylesheet so all the images on all the posts have text too close.  The text is in the edge of the shadow area around the images.

There are two ways to fix this.  Remove the shadow from the images so the 8px will work  or remove the in-line styles from all the posts with images.  The later can be done either by hand or possible with a search and replace plugin, but you better backup the database first before using such a plugin.

(Yes, that’s an <hr /> right above.)

Better yet.  Don’t use in-line styles to set things like borders, background color, margins.  If you don’t know who to make these changes in the theme’s style.css file then find someone that can do it for you.  That’s a whole lot better than cobbling up your site with in-line styles which will come back to haunt you at a later date.

From: Real Estate Blog Lab The Case Against In-line Styles