DRListings’ News

Hi there, I’m proud to let you know (specificaly our clients - real estate agents and home owners) that in an attempt to get even more French and Spanish visitors, we added the possibility to enter a brief description in Spanish AND French!

It may seams little at first sight but, when our listings pages are rendered in Spanish or in French the interface was all translated except the brief description of all ten listings. This was making these pages mutlti-language. For SEO it was giving some strange results. From the visitor’s point of view it was not good enough from our point of view. People understand that our web site is primarily an English real estate web site. But since we want to give every visitor the same experience whether their English speaking or not, we had to add that feature.

If you want more info on how to use it efficiently, go to our contact page and ask for support. Our technicien will be glad to give you more information and advices on how to use that new feature.

Cheers!

So here is the default list of search engine that Google Analytics support in its system.

google, yahoo, msn, aol, lycos, ask, altavista, netscape, cnn, looksmart, about, mamma, alltheweb, gigablast, voila, virgilio, live, baidu, alice, seznam, yandex, najdi, aol, club-internet, mama, seznam, search.

Now let say, like us, that some of your visitors are coming from xxx search engine and that you know it because you have access to the stats from your hosting service provider. So according to google, you just have to (more…)

Yes I have been silent here but not on PHP coding and web design.

We have moved our advertising section under osCommerce.

We have created new real estate advertising products and services. Like the DRL Data Core^Lite which is the fastest way for our clients to add their listings to their own web site. There is also a PRO version which is (more…)

Here is a list of all the Addon that were submitted in the Custom Addon - Releases section on the OR forum.

• Addon Delete Site Logs
• Addon Demo for beginners
• Addon Google Maps Geo Coded
• Booking Agent for online reservations
• Client Testimonial with text blurb
• Contact Form Addon
• Featured Listing Viewer
• Field Type URL with Anchor Text
• flash addon additon to PTView
• General Statistics
• Google Maps Addon
• image gallery with lightbox js
• listing view features layout
• Listing view features layout with comma seperated values
• MENUCONFIGuration Addon
• Mouse Over Images
• Multiple Currency Exchange Rates
• Multiple Select Link 2 or 3 level for search
• next_prev template Addons
• Notification/Pruning Addon
• Open House Addon
• Printer Friendly Search Results
• Page404 addon page
• Paypal Addon to Charge for Listings
  Autor’s web site
• PayPal Subscription Addon
  Autor’s web site
• PHPNuke Module
• Revised Google Maps Addon
• RSS Feeds for OR 2.X.X+
• Search by listingID
• Simple Banner Ad Manager
• sitemap addon
  Autor’s web site
• SQL menu addon v1.03
• Template Changer
• URL VTours Ver 2
• User Page
• VieleRETS 1.0.0 Release Candidate Available
• View all agents/users addon
• Watermarks on images
• Welcome User Addon
• YouTube Addon 1.0.0

I will add more text and comments later on.

Some search queries on Google trends.

First what’s the best “hôtel,maison,villa,condo,appartement”
maison,maisons
in English Hotel,Homes,House,Villa,apartment,Condo
house,houses

Second lets compare “appartement à louer,maison à vendre”.
apartment for rent,house for sale

Conclusion,

1. Avoid the plural form
2. More people are looking for house than apartment.
3. In English Homes is more or less the same as houses even though those words should not mean the same thing.

. . . to be continued.

As you may already know (if not, check this post and this one), when our clients are listing their property on our Dominican Real Estate web site - DRListing.com, their properties are shown also on one of 3 other real estate web sites depending where their property is located on the north coast.
Now, we have found something interesting to get even more exposure! We have found a preatty well made and smart property web site. It is called PropSmart. This web site enable anybody to list his properties for free and is well organized so that in just a few click of your mouse, you get to your location of interest.
For now, there is no properties from the Dominican Republic but, its just a matter of time! If you see what I mean

In the last few days we have made a lot of changes in the background and around our Dominican Real Estate listing Web site, DRListings.com.
We have released a new web site to show exclusively all the properties in Puerto Plata. http://www.silver-port-properties.com/. This new web site which still needs some work should help to get more exposure to our clients listing some properties in Puerto Plata.

I may talk about some of the other changes in an other post.

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.