Managing Site Navigation

Each link in the navigation header of your website represents a page in your WordPress site.  In order to keep a clean header, you may “hide” pages from the navigation bar.  A hidden page is still fully functional, and you can link to it, but it will not appear as a link in the top bar.  The Site Navigation panel also allows you to drag and drop reorder the pages that appear in your navigation bar of links up top.  Follow the instructions below to hide a page from your navigation.  Please note that the same set of instructions can be used to “unhide” a page.

Step 1: From the “Manage” menu, select “Site Navigation”.

Step 2: Hover your mouse over the small arrows ( >> ) next to the page that you wish to hide.  The hide link will automatically appear.  Click the link and the page name will become partially transparent.  Click the “Update” button to apply these changes to your website.

The page has now been hidden from the navigation bar and will no longer appear.

Changing the home page on your IDX Blogger site

You can change your IDX Blogger home page (the page that people see first when they visit) to whatever page you want.  This means that you can select your blog, the public IDX map, or even a custom static page that you created as your home page.

Adding, Editing, and Removing Widgets from the sidebar

The sections down the right hand side of your IDX Blogger website are called “widgets”.  Widgets can be used to customize your site to fit your needs.  For instance, the “Agent Info” widget includes your name and contact information as well as your logo.  There are other optional widgets that you can turn on including a mortgage rate calculator, Featured Listings, and even recent blog posts.

Step 1:  Hover your mouse over the “Design” menu, and click “Widgets”

Step 2:  Use the widget manager to Add unused widgets (located on the left), Edit or Remove existing widgets (located in the blue bubbles on the right).  Widgets can also be reordered by clicking and dragging up or down.

Step 3: Remember to click “Save Changes” when you are finished.

Adding a slideshow widget to your IDX Blogger site

A slideshow is a great way to show off a gallery of images that you created.  Visitors to your site will see an elegant picture on the right hand side of your site, and the picture changes every few seconds to the next image in the gallery.  Follow the instructions below to add a similar slideshow to your site:

Step 1: A Gallery must already exist for the slideshow to use.  Click here to see how to create a gallery and add images.

Step 2: Go to Design > Widgets

Step 3: Click “Add” next to the NextGEN Slideshow widget.

Step 4: Click “Edit” on the slideshow widget bubble on the right hand side.

Step 5: Select which gallery you would like this slideshow to use.  You can also change the size of the slideshow display.  Please note that increasing the size too much can affect the layout of your page.

Step 6: Click “Save Changes”, and your slideshow is now located on the right hand side of your website.

Adding an Image Gallery

A gallery of images is a great way to add some character and content to a page or blog post.  A gallery can even be displayed as a slideshow included into a page, post, or even as a sidebar widget.  Follow the instructions below to include a gallery or slideshow in a blog post.

Step 1: Create the Gallery before writing your blog post.  From the “Manage” menu, click “Add Gallery”.

Step 2: Name your new Gallery and save it.  Click “Upload images” to define which images will be included in this gallery.

Step 3: Click “Browse” to find images on your local computer.  Once you have selected one, you may click Browse again to add more images.  Select which Gallery these images should be added to, then click “Upload Images” to move all of your selected images from your computer to the gallery.

Step 4: Insert your new gallery into a post using the “Add NextGEN Gallery” button.

Step 5: Select which gallery to add to this post, as well as the display type.  An “image list” will display a grid of your pictures, while a Slideshow will show a single image that changes every few seconds.

Step 6: Once your blog post or page is saved, the Gallery will appear on the client side (Please note that the gallery will not display in the edit window but will add some special text instead.)

IDX Blogger at the RMLS Techfair March 19th

Its that time of year again and this year HomeQuest will be out in force at the RMLS tech fair.

Come and meet the team behind HomeQuest and IDX Blogger, get exclusive tips and tricks, and as always some cool giveaways!

The RMLS Tech fair will be on March 19th and will be at the convention center, come and see us!

Naming Pages and Site Navigation

Hey Folks,

Just wanted to give you a bit of advice when creating new pages. Remember, each new page you create will be displayed in your sites top level navigation bar (unless you specify otherwise via the site naviagtion editor under the manage menu). When naming pages please take this into account, naming a page: “About me and what I do for a living” is great but it will take up almost half of your navigation bar and is way to informative for a text link to an information page, The best way to represent that link would be: “About me”

If you would like to get creative with page titles, remember to use the site navigation editor to change the  display title used within your navigation. To access the navigation editor enter your dashboard and navigate to manage > site navigation.

An Important Reminder

If you have recently switched your old HomeQuest site to a new IDX blogger site, Please bare in mind this is a pretty huge platform change and these changes take time to propagate within the search engines.

If you had some organic traffic previously and have noticed a drop – don’t worry! its just the search engines re indexing your new site and it will return to normal usually within 12-14 days (sometimes longer depending on the size of your old site and how many pages it had indexed)

If you already have an established blog or website you would like to switch to the IDX Blogger platform, Please contact us before making the switch, we may be able to help minimize any disruption with your search engine positions and traffic! We can also help with exporting and importing from any WordPress platform.

Remember, once these changes have been indexed you get the huge SEO benefit of using the WordPress platform so you should see some overall increase in search engine positions making the switch well worth it.

Any questions, comments, feedback? please contact me!

How To: Display Listings On Your IDX Blogger

We’ve been getting a lot of questions regarding displaying your listings on your new IDX Blogger websites, Well – in todays how to we’ll walk you through displaying all of your personal and office listings and also how to maximize visibility of your listings.

Firstly, if you log into your HomeQuest account and navigate to Search listings > My listings you will see all of your current listings and your office listings with checkboxes beside them. If you check the boxes they will be displayed under “Featured listings” within your IDX sidebar widget. you can be as selective as you like and only display listings you want to show up.

To enable the “Featured listings” widget in your sidebar navigate to your IDX blogger site, then design, then widgets and drag and drop the widget to your sidebar and click save.

Going one step further, if you would like to promote a individual listing, you can always make a page or post (navigate to write then page) and make a marketing page specifically for that listing, even add a gallery or two! This is great way to maximize exposure, even save the URL and distribute it to clients or print out some business cards, the possibilities are endless.

How To: Get a URL from the IDX

In this how to I’m going to cover how to get a URL out of the IDX and into a link on your IDX Blogger site. What can this be used for I hear you ask? Well, a number of things actually:

• Put a direct link to a neighborhood / area  on your site or sidebar
• Link an image to a certain part of the map
• link directly to a listing in map view that can be sent to a client or individually promoted

To get the URL (link) from our IDX system, simply open the IDX map view in your browser then Right click on the area / neighborhood / listing / blog post from the list view and select “copy link location”

Thats it! now you have the link you can paste that into your wordpress editor, paste it into an email, paste it onto your facebook or whatever else you would like a direct link!

Stay tuned over the next few days for some slightly more advanced SEO techniques

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