Now that most of us have recovered from the Advanced Access Fiasco earlier this week, I wanted to offer some insight regarding a couple items, primarily:

1. What to do if your host’s service goes down and your site is inaccessible (which generally also means email is also inaccessible/bouncing)
2. How to manually back-up a hosted/template site such as Advanced Access just in case the ultimate nightmare should occur …. data is unrecoverable and your site must be rebuilt from scratch.

For those of you unfamiliar with the issue that brought down something like 10,000 REALTOR sites, in a nutshell, this past Monday morning all sites (including Advanced Access’s own sales site) went down. Phones weren’t being answered, voicemail boxes were full, people were panicking. I personally was attempting every departmental and personal extension I had on file with no luck. They finally posted on the ActiveRain.com blog very late Monday evening (actually, it’s timestamped 12:10am Tues), “At this time, Advanced Access is having significant power issues at our offices and all services are currently down ….”. They had anticipated having sites back up Tuesday morning; however, that did not happen until late in the day for some, and others reporting still being down the next morning.

So … if something like this were to ever happen again with AA (or any other vendor-based website), what do we do in a pinch … and how do we best prepare ourselves going forward?

First, as you’re reading along here … if your head begins to spin with the technical tasks presented, just remember, you don’t have to know how to do this stuff. There are Virtual Assistants out there that can do all this for you!

Second, for ease of illustration since this is all going to be fairly technical as it is, I’ll pretend my site is hosted by Advanced Access (which I’ll refer to as AA). I’ll also pretend my actual domain was purchased and is managed by GoDaddy since they’re my preferred domain vendor).

Third, let me begin with a couple clarifications. When I refer to a “vendor-hosted website”, I’m referring to those sites like AdvancedAccess, Homestead, iHouse, PropertyMinder, etc. These are sites that are not “portable”; meaning you built the site using their proprietary site-builder tools and not a program like Dreamweaver or FrontPage. When I refer to a “custom site”, I’m referring to those sites built more from scratch using HTML, Dreamweaver, FrontPage or the like.

One other item to note. The average REALTOR will sign-up for a vendor-hosted website and part of that package will include the vendor securing the domain name (i.e., www.amber-realtor.com) [not a real site]. Generally, when the vendor secures/hosts/renews the domain name, it is at a higher cost than an independent domain registrar, such as GoDaddy. Additionally, the client loses virtually all control over that domain, and there are less features (such as the number of email addresses) available than if the domain were purchased through a registrar such as GoDaddy.

With my clients, I always recommend the domain be hosted with GoDaddy because:

1. It’s less than $10/year
2. The client retains complete control over functionality (more on this in a bit)
3. The account includes 100 alias email addresses and 1 POP3 address, with the ability to purchase more at a very reasonable rate

So, my first recommendation is to make sure you transfer your domain to an independent registrar like GoDaddy. After it’s transferred, you’ll need to update your nameservers (your website hosting company can give these to you) in the account control panel. At the same time you do this, you’ll need to email some “MX Record” information to your host so you retain your email on the GoDaddy servers. GoDaddy has complete instructions on this … just call their customer service and they can walk you through it … they’ll even send you the email that you forward to the website host. Note … during these processes there will be some short downtimes … a small price to pay for keeping control over your business’s web presence.

After this is complete, my second recommendation is to prepare & familiarize yourself with these emergency procedures in case your website host goes down and you need your email and a temporary web presence.

If your website goes down for an unacceptable length of time, you’ll want to do the following:

The first priority is your email:

1. Login to your GoDaddy control panel and set the nameservers back to the GoDaddy defaults (customer service can tell you what those are). This does not happen instantly … it can take hours for it to update.
2. Once this occurs, your emails will start coming through again.

The second priority is getting your web presence up again.

1. If you have a secondary website, you would now “forward” your domain to that website via your account control panel. You can also utilize the “masking” feature … when you mask a website this is what happens: a person types in www.amber-realtor.com and even though it’s forwarded to www.ambersothersite.com the browser’s address bar reads www.amber-realtor.com. It’s “masked”.
2. If you don’t have a secondary website, perhaps forward it to your blog, your franchise “free agent site” (I know Keller Williams offers these), your virtual tour inventory page (i.e., http://www.tourfactory.com/ offers a great looking agent inventory page), your Homes & Land webpage they gave you when you placed that ad, or any other webpage that markets you and your listings … think through all the marketing you’ve done, and all those companies who included a web presence (that you never use) with the product or ad you ordered — let’s face it, at this point, any of these pages are better than a “page cannot be displayed error”.

In preparation … in case you have to implement the above procedures, after you have in mind the website you’d most likely forward your domain in a pinch, write the URL down or keep it in a computer file you can access later.

My third recommendation is to backup your vendor-hosted website. Depending on your site, this may be a bit of a feat … but it will certainly be less of a feat than having nothing and starting from scratch if the unthinkable ever happens.

I am a FrontPage person myself, so I would complete this tasked based on the use of FrontPage. A Dreamweaver expert will know how to do this in Dreamweaver. The key is having a web design product like one of these that enables a person to “open” a live webpage and save it locally. When this occurs, all elements won’t save (i.e., images or other host specific elements like slideshows, featured property modules, search modules, form submission elements) as these types of elements will display on the page when the site is online (it pulls from the file online); however, but if the site were to go down, those “links” would be broken. So what is the benefit? I have a client who has invested hundreds of hours customizing his AA site. We’ve put together relocation pages, buyer specific pages, seller specific pages, client pages, team pages, community pages, a ton of custom written text, etc. I have all the custom images already on file. The most time consuming part of recreating his website would be the custom verbiage and design of the actual layout. If we had all the verbiage on file, and the general page layouts, it would save countless hours if we had to recreate the site. You could hire a reputable web design virtual assistant for a one-time project of “backing-up” your site. At least that way you wouldn’t have to start from scratch.

Even despite this really really bad fiasco with Advanced Access … I have to say, they’re still my favorite of all the REALTOR specific vendor-based websites out there. I love their Intellicards, the ability to almost 100% customize the site, unlimited pages, and they’ve done a phenomenal job with their premier marketing for one of my clients … he is always ranked on the first page (and generally in the top 3) on Google and Yahoo for his (very competitive) areas in organic search results.

But, as a precaution, I have backed-up the majority of his core pages and suggest you do the same ;o).

Happy Thursday!

Amber

Single property websites are appealing to sellers, informational to potential buyers, and a great selling point on a listing presentation.  Especially websites with a direct URL (i.e., www.123Anywhere.com), single property websites are also handy for marketing on postcards, flyers and print ads.

For example, iHouse offers their Spotlight product on a volume price model (i.e., more website credits you purchase, the less each costs) starting at $99 for one website (includes domain name).  AgencyLogic offers a similar PowerSites solution starting at $50 per site license (also includes domain name).  Single Property Sites offers their product on a monthly subscription basis, based on the number of active sites per month. For example, their “Best Value” package allows up to 5 active sites per month and comes with a pricetag of $29/month. A domain name will cost an additional $12/year per property. 

This can be quite pricey, especially if you’re a top selling agent. For example, I have a client who currently has 20 active listings and another 3 that are under contract, taking back-up offers, so marketing continues.  In his case, the tools above would cost:

• iHouse Spotlight:  25 activation package = $1,750
• AgencyLogic PowerSite: 25 site pack = $875
• SinglePropertySite: $112/month for 25 active sites (equivalent to $1,344/year) + $11.99/domain name (another $275.77 to market his 23 listings) = $1619.77

But …. do you really need to spend the big bucks to achieve the same thing?  NO!  You don’t.  Here’s the alternative solution that will only cost $9.17 per year per listing per year.

Chances are, as a real estate professional, you already have an agent website.  Also, chances are, you have the ability to display your listings on that website, with the further ability to add items to those listings such as a virtual tour link, images, custom descriptive text, etc. Also, your website probably already has a method to contact you for more information about the displayed listing.  If your website doesn’t offer these basic tools, I would first suggest investing your marketing dollars here.  One great tool for this is AdvancedAccess.

After you’ve created the listing on your website, that webpage will hold a unique URL. To find that unique URL, look at your webpage using the public view (i.e., not in edit/administrator mode) — simply go to your website and use your navigation to get to this webpage. When this webpage is displayed, right-click your mouse on an “empty” whitespace area of the webpage (i.e., not on an image, link or other element). A mini-dialogue box will appear … choose “properties”.  Within this new box, about half-way down, you’ll see an Address (URL) section that will look something like this: http://www.essential-admin.com/portfolio.html.  You’ll want to select this URL address by placing your mouse at the beginning of the URL and holding down your left mouse key as you drag it across the complete URL so the whole URL turns black. While it’s black, copy it to your clipboard by simply pressing your Ctrl+C keys (together/simultaneously) on your keyboard. You won’t see anything happen but it’s just been copied to your Windows clipboard. 

Now, open up a Word document and paste this URL (i.e., either select the Edit/Paste command from the menu or use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+V). I recommend having a document where you keep all your property URLs, so this will be your first entry in that document. Make sure you label it with the property description ;o).

Now, go to GoDaddy and purchase a domain.  I recommend selecting something that will be easy to market, such as 123anywhere.com. Once purchased, you use their “Forward Domains” menu to “point” this new domain to your existing webpage. Just copy (Ctrl+C) the URL text from your Word document you created above, and then paste (Ctrl+V) it into the GoDaddy forwarding box.  Save and you’re done. Give it a couple hours to update. When ready, type the new domain name into your Internet browser and you should see that property page display.

If you’d like to further make it display nicely, “mask” the domain when you’re setting up the fowarding (there’s another easy option in that menu for this). If you “mask” the domain, when a visitor types in www.123anywhere.com, their browser address bar will say www.123anywhere.com instead of the website URL on your website.

Using this method has the potential of saving you a lot of money in two ways:
1) You only pay less than $10 for a domain name.
2) You save time … whether that be your own valuable time or that of a VA or assistant … in creating the webpage. For example, chances are, you already either add or “enhance” the listing on your website once, so it’s already there. If you use a secondary tool to display the property page, you (or your VA/Assistant) have to enter the information a second time into their system.

If these steps are a bit daunting, but you’d still love to take advantage of the cost savings provided by this alternative method, contact a virtual assistant to help you. If you need assistance locating a good one, contact me and I’ll be glad to help.