Mike Price – Trainer
Getting up and running with a LIVE Data IDX website can be super-easy.
Provide your site visitors with a great home search resource in no time. FBS Products Smartframe IDX provides “cut and paste simplicity.”
Just how easy? Read on…
To get started, you’ll need a website hosting service. There are many options for quickly finding great options to design and host your website. The technology behind today’s do it yourself systems takes into account important aspects of the user experience. Basically, this means that if you can operate a web browser, you can easily design a great-looking website that includes a dynamic home search. No need to be a techie: just point, click, cut, paste, and promote your new site.
Competition for great site builders is fierce and good for the industry. With Smartframe IDX directly connected to Flexmls LIVE Data, you can have a professional home search without breaking the bank.
Three companies fight for the top spot in the template-based sites: Wix, Weebly, and Squarespace. For less than $25 per month, you can access all of the premium features offered by any one of these platforms.
Squarespace is used by more FBS IDX Smartframe subscribers than any of the DIY builders. It’s ease-of-use, and low price makes it a perfect marriage with FBS IDX Solutions’ Smartframe IDX.
Squarespace has gone to great lengths to amass a template library that not only includes some of the best images in the category, but they have also done a great deal of work on the system that makes it super easy to add Smartframe IDX code.
Working with what is referred to as “Content Blocks,” the process for building pages is very straightforward and easy to understand. Squarespace offers all-new FBS IDX subscribers a discount and, when you combine the low cost of our Smartframe IDX product, it’s a fantastic value and great way to start capturing leads with the calls to action built into each listing result. When a portal account is created via the SmartFrame (suggesting your visitors sign-up to receive listing updates that fit their criteria), it drops your new lead’s information right into your Flexmls contact manager where you can then nurture your new relationship to a successful close.
If you want to see how all of this comes together live and in action, we’ve done some training webinars where I am joined by marketing professional and authorized Squarespace trainer, Ben Robertson. Take a look at the links below.
Optimizing Your Squarespace Site For Lead Capture
DIY Simple & Wallet Friendly. Squarespace & Smartframe IDX
The VIP plan with top priority support at Wix is just $19 per month. It includes an unlimited amount of bandwidth, a free domain, and a host of other bonuses, including some advertising. There are quite a few templates, but access to real estate specific themes doesn’t seem to be available. No worry though, there are plenty of options to choose from to build your site with a dynamic navigation menu that includes Smartframe IDX saved searches. As with all of the options, there are many great stock photos to select from, and with just a little time and effort, you can design a unique looking site.
Weebly has an excellent system for building-out individual pages on websites that uses a simple “drag and drop” editing system. By adding what they refer to as “content elements,” you select the type of content to add to your page, drag it over, and size accordingly. Whether it be text, photos, videos, or other page elements, once you’ve selected from their templates, it’s pretty easy to work the elements to design-out a page.
Adding Smartframe IDX code to a Weebly page is not quite as straightforward as some other sites. There are video tutorials along the way that guide you through the process of adding your Smartframe IDX code to add home search to individual pages.
Weebly takes a bit longer to get the hang of, but it can certainly be a good option for creating a navigation system that includes LIVE Data home search.