Real Estate Blog Lab

Mailto @: = “SPAM IN MY INBOX”

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 . . .

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”

It is a pretty common for a real estate blog to have a lot of links in their sidebars to custom searches, featured categories, etc.

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?