Finalist for “Best Real Estate Blog in Texas”

I used Houston association of realtors (our local mls service). They give realtors a page (on their site) so send buyers to search the database. Instead of sending her viewers to an external site, I just “iframed” it into her site. Nothing tricky there. I made a custom page template which included an iframe for the mls search form (and results) then wrote a page (including an introduction and links to her other search forms) and used that page template.

They also provide a few other search variations; school finder, map search, etc. Did the same things for them.

https://buyandsellwithshannon.com/home-finder/

Sure. To start with, I made custom urls. (settings/permalinks) I set them to /%category%/%postname%/.

I then made a “home.php” file into my theme folder that basically controls how the front page is displayed. Basic html page that displays the content on her front page.

In my links (top of the page), I link to the category archive. Her blog would be https://buyandsellwithshannon.com/blog/ and her news category would be https://buyandsellwithshannon.com/news/ and her listings would be https://buyandsellwithshannon.com/featured-listings/ .

Keep in mind that posts can be in multiple categories. When she gets a new listing, it is added into the blog, featured-listings, and their individual neighborhood categories. this way it shows up in the blog and the “featured listings” page.

I then got tricky and made a couple of custom archive templates. (see the template documentation and template hierarchy in the documantation section). Doing this enables me to add some custom content to the beginning of the archive. For example, She sells homes in Spring Lakes subdivision. I have a domain name of https://buyspringlakes.com that redirects to https://buyandsellwithshannon.com/spring-lakes/ – this is her “spring-lakes” category. That custom archive template has a video, map and other neighborhood information before displaying her listings in that neighborhood.

Probably more information than you wanted but that is how i did it. One of the beautiful things of wordpress is with a little understanding of theme files, you can bend it to do things it was never intended to do.

I know this is an old thread but I just redid the graphics on the site. That was the main thing it was missing… all the graphics were rather amateurish. I got a graphics guy to help us out and it makes all the difference in the world. What do you think?

https://buyandsellwithshannon.com

I must hand it to you. This is one of the best I’ve seen for it’s content. It’s attractive without distracting from the content. Well done!

Really awesome webdesign and topmost functional at the same time! Gratulations, you did a good job!

You site is eye catching. Draws a person in to read what it is about.

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Thanks for the complements, guys. This is a work in progress. Seems like every month or so I am tweaking the theme to customize something.