DRListings’ News

Yesterday while trying to analyse the ranking of our web site for some particular keywords, I found something interesting. Did you know that the people from Irland are the ones that are searching the most for Hotels? According to Google Trends, it looks so. In fact, the keyword «Hotel» is used almost twice as much as the keyword «House» see these results.
Maybe thats why there is so many Online Hotel Booking web sites! Wow 121 000 000 results on Google.
I will now let you think about it!

In an attempt simplify futher developement on DRlistings.com, we have decided to change the default charactor set of our web site. First, it makes the links directory render correctly i.e. without the strange charactors that were appearing for the foreign language as this tool is setup to work in UTF-8 by default. The new Dominican Republic News had this same requirement.
For the English reader, it doesn’t make much difference but for the Latin languages it does make a difference.
It was also required to simplify the use of the URL Rewriting that we are using now extensively.
From our clients point of view, it doesn’t make any difference also since it doesn’t involve any new particular attention when they edit their listings.
We may explain later, in french, how this was done and how easy it was to implement it. But the article will be submitted to Paul’s web space on MSN Space.
See ya!

Hi everybody!
Today we started a new section on DRListings.com. We are working on a Dominican Republic news section for convenience to our viewers. We think that even though a viewer is or is not interested in buying or renting, he may be interested to know a little more about the Dominican Republic and maybe after gatering more info about this Paradise Island, he may change his mind and decide to look further about properties.
For now, the Dominican Republic news section is still in beta stage but you can have a look at it by following this link.
This section is based on the RSSLib tool available on the 2RSS.com web site.
If you have some good RSS feed to suggest, fill our feed suggestion form.

Yes that’s it. We just released our brand new little cakes. Cabarate Real Estate and Sosúa Real Estate are just out of the oven and they’re HOT! Surely there is some more work and glazing to do on those little cakes but there released and the major search engines have been told of this fact as soon as it was possible. They have been submitted trough the Google sitemaps and Yahoo Site Explorer. Soon those web sites will get us and our clients some more targeted leads.

We are now in the process of starting the creation of the DRListings.com Network. The two first web site that are in the oven are www.cabarete-real-estate.com and www.sosua-real-estate.com. They can be found in those two temporary URL: http://www.drlistings.com/cabarete-re/ and http://www.drlistings.com/sosua-re/ respectively for those who would like to follow their evolution until their official release.
Stay tuned!

So finally we have made it! Yes everything is set up now for us to create some real estate web site with cross advertising on DRListings.com. The idea was simple but we had to work on it. There is some sample so you can look at it. There is the VIP Caribbean Property web site that we just created for one of our client that was interested by this brilliant idea. We are planning on using this same system for our other domain name like www.sosua-real-estate.com and www.cabarete-real-estate.com. Stay tuned.

[added]
We have added a special section on our Real Estate web site for those who would be interested in having a Real Estate web site based on the Dominican Real Estate web site template that we can deliver. Just follow the preceding link to find more info about this new offer.

Today I’m going to talk to about something very weird that is happening here.

So, here it is. If you are a Realtor in Dominican Republic you are facing a strong competition because it’s almost impossible to get any exclusivity agreement with the property owner. The properties ends up being for sale by more than 3 or 4 different real estate agent company at the same time. But, there is something even worst than that. And that thing is a consequence of that popular habit. Since there can be more than one Realtor trying to sale a property, then some other can fake being interested in buying or renting a house advertised by another realty company to get some informations about it without having to travel and get the informations on their own.

Being aware about that, we are going to implement a special feature on our property listing web site (DRListings.com) so that the IP number of any person making an inquiry will be stored for review if needed. Wew wew wew I see some people saying “Hey it against the personal privacy!”. Not really, the only thing that an IP number can tell is that a person was “seen” by our server as coming from a given IP number so in no way we will be able to track, hack or gater any other informations from that peson. If you have any argument against that feature, just comment on this post and try to convince me not to do it!

Have you ever wanted to know when and on which pages the search engine robots were crawling your web site? Ok, I see the old techy smiling :). Yes you can always dig down your log files, use some third party statistic web site. But why not doing it on your own? Try the following web application. We just installed it on DRListings.com. So, we now have a tool to figure out how the search engines are crawling our web site and how often they will crawl the same pages and some new pages. We hope it will help us optimize our web site to better serve our clients.
RobotStats: the Crawlers Tracker - Tracking Spiders Script

This page is a none exhaustive list of the tools that our web masters utilize on a daily basis.

Web Browser

• Internet Explorer 6.0 Can’t develop any web site without being sure it will show up correctly under it!
• Firefox The easiest to develop for!
• Opera In between
• Konqueror - Almost as good as Firefox. That’s the KDE desktop’s default browser under Linux.
• SeaMonkey - Was called the mozilla suite before. As good as Firefox because it utilize the same HTML engine.

Online tools

• Google Analytics - You need to create a Google account to be able to utilize that ressource. It give a better overview of how and from where people are finding our web site.
• Google Site Map - The same as above with this other usefull tool.
• Google Alerts - This tool is usefull to follow what is added to the Google’s index.
• Google Maps - This tool could be usefull to locate a property available on DRListings.com but since there is not much info about the Dominican Republic in that tool, we are still waiting before actually implementing a service based on this tool in our web site.
• Alexa Page Rank -Some people like to think that it is still a usefull ressource to help web master figure out the popularity of their web site. I found it usefull just to check how far from reality they are! It is base on the browsing experience of the people that utilize the Alexa Toolbar, so!
• SEO book Where you will find some very well design tools to check your ranking and optimize a web site. We may use some their tools here on DRListings.net with some little adaptation in a near future.
• IP to Location on the SEOMOZ.org web site.
• A large variety of SEO tools on the SEOChat web site

Web editor Softwares

• DreamWeaver - A powerfull wbe site editor. Our designer use it with Firework to prepare the layout of the new web site and to maintain other web site.
• HTML-kit - My prefered flat text HTML editor. I like to keep FULL control over the HTML tags.
• Fireworks - A powerfull graphic software for the layout designer and to prepare the litle graphics tha will spice up a web site.
• TopStyle - In its Lite form it already a powerfull Cascading style sheet editor. The pro version incorporate the features of the Lite version but is more oriented toward a full HTML editor.
• WinAmp - Everybody has the right to work in a pleasent environement.
• Nvu - A XHTML compliant WISIWYG editor. Very usefull to create a draft XHTML file with styles. Its development is apparently on the hold for some reason. Maybe to move forward on new technologies.

Operating system

• Windows XP - Every body knows it! I think
• Linux Slackware - Linux version that we have installed on our Linux machine.
• FreeBSD - The OS available on our production hosting server.

I just found an interesting web site. It is called The Caribbean Toolkit If you are planning to start a business you may find that ressource more than usefull. It’s sponsored by the World Bank. You will find some tools. It is worth to check. Don’t miss it!