What Are Sellers & Buyers Most Impressed with on Real Estate Firm Websites?

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According to statistics, 90% of homebuyers use the internet during some point of their home search for a new home. This isn’t exactly shocking given how much a part of our lives the internet has come and how heavily we rely on it for everything from research to shopping for clothing. However, you may find it interesting to see what potential real estate buyers and sellers look for when it comes time to choose a real estate agency in terms of their agency’s website.

  1. Ease of navigation – Buyers and sellers look for real estate websites that are easy to maneuver through. It’s important that information is organized and accessible. Real estate browsers are often turned off by cluttered sites with too much text.
  2. Professional photography – Potential buyers and sellers like to see listings with professional photography. Multiple angles and great lighting often catch a buyer’s eye.
  3. Important Additional Info – Those searching for a new real estate property often look for additional information pertaining to the community, local schools, local amenities, etc.
  4. Housing market stats – Prospective buyers and sellers like to see stats from the previous year’s market on real estate websites. Providing statistics shows that a real estate firm remains current on local real estate patterns and trends.
  5. Virtual tours – Many internet real estate browsers like to see virtual or video tours of properties. Through this channel potential buyers are able to see a property in a unique way without having to attend an open house. Potential sellers like to know that their properties will be displayed online in a dynamic and engaging way.

Clearly, while it takes more than a nice web presence for a real estate firm to be successful, it’s important to choose a web design agency that takes its website and online listings seriously—. Contact us today to discuss your real estate website.

New Sites & Apps for Buyers & Homeowners

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We discussed the real estate industry’s gradual shift to electronic status earlier, and it seems this is further proof of this interesting evolution.

A number of new sites and applications have been developed specifically for real estate buyers and homeowners.

Here are a few of the most interesting:

    1. Nextdoor Social Network – A private, free social network that allows locals to connect with one another. Nextdoor allows neighbors to meet one another without having to go door to door or waiting to bump in to one another. Once a Nextdoor member, individuals in a specific neighborhood can complete an individual profile for themselves as well as their family members. Nextdoor takes privacy quite seriously and only adds neighborhoods once 9 neighbors sign up within 21 days. Each member must verify their address with a credit card by phone as well.
    1. Next4Less.com – This social marketing platform provides homeowners with a broad variety of services related to your home. You can invite preferred service providers to join the site as well. Members have access to local and nationwide product discounts that can be shared with friends.
  1. Homezada.com – This online system provides an easy way for homeowners to maintain a current catalog of the contents of their homes for insurance purposes. Additionally, Homezada.com provides those interested in remodeling or decorating with a way to easily keep track of budgets and find great deals.

What do you think of these websites? Do you think any or all of them would be useful to you now or after you purchase new real estate?

An Innovative, fresh and entertaining website

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Just as successful brick and mortar retailers employ merchandising strategies to keep their stores fresh and interesting to shoppers online retailers must be good web merchandisers, exerting ongoing efforts to add innovative site features and capabilities , enhance the look and feel of their sites, heighten viewer interest with audio and live video, and have fresh product offerings and special promotions.. Websites need to be easy to read and interesting, with lots of eye appeal. Website features that are distinctive, engaging and entertaining add value to the experience of spending time at the site and are thus strong competitive assets. For example amazon has gone to great lengths of to foster a strong sense of community among users and visitors as par of its strategy to set itself apart from competitors. Moreover, websites have to be clearly marketed. Unless, visitors hear about the site. like what they see on their first visit, and are intrigued enough to return again and again, a pure dot-com company will not generate traffic and revenues necessary to its survival.

How Your Dental Office Benefits from Having a Website

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If you are dentist and have a dental office that you want to promote, then it’s essential that you have a website. Most dentists are not aware of all the benefits they can get from having web presence.

When was the last time your patients used a yellow pages? Today’s people are using yellow pages less than ever and that usage will only decrease with time. When people start looking for a dentist, that search starts online or smartphone and usually with Google or Bing. According to online statistics, over 80% of all website traffic comes via search engines.

What does this mean for your dental practice? You must have a website so that your potential patients can get instant information and a visual representation of your dental practice.

The Internet never sleeps, and neither do many people. Having a compelling website, you’ll be able to share your business and contact information with patients 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

How does it help your office

Being on the Web nowadays, with an engaging and vibrant website also increases your business credibility. Consider the alternative: What would happen if a potential patient searched for your office on the Web and found nothing or worse another dental office nearby? You just missed out on a potential lead.

With a website, your practice can also make appointments and take phone call during business hours. There is often no need to hire admin staff.

A website may also help improve patient relations and make it easy for you to provide a high level of information(e.g dental hygiene tips) and build long-lasting relationships with your patients. Through your website, you can give potential patients all the information about your specialties that will enable them to make an informed decision. You may even want to create feedback form on your website so that you can receive and answer patient questions.

Furthermore, having a website means your office can increase patient base and expand reach to a new audience to grow your business and generate greater profits.

Below is an example of a dental office website design:

Dental Office Benefits

“Youtube-dl” is Simply Awesome To Download Entire YouTube Channel!

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Recently a client asked me to download their entire youtube channel so they can host the videos internally. However, there were over 100+ videos and downloading them manually would have been a very time consuming task so I did a little bit of research discovered this simple yet very powerful command called “youtube-dl”.  You can use it to download videos straight off of YouTube.

About youtube-dl:
“youtube-dl is a small command-line program to download videos from YouTube.com and a few more sites. It requires the Python interpreter (2.6, 2.7, or 3.3+), and it is not platform specific. It should work in your Unix box, in Windows or in Mac OS X. It is released to the public domain, which means you can modify it, redistribute it or use it however you like.“

If you ever wanted to download the entire Youtube channel using Ubuntu, Youtube-dl might just be exactly what you were looking for to do just that.

Here is how it works: 

First download it it here: http://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/download.html or git clone git://source.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg.git ffmpeg

Then run these two simple commands.
Option #1 – To download an entire channel use this command:

           youtube-dl -citw ytuser:<USERNAME HERE>

Option #2 – To download all videos on a single playlist use this command: 

           youtube-dl -citw <THE PLAYLIST URL HERE>

 
Optional step: Convert your .MP4 to .MP3 files 
 
Note that this will bulk convert multiple files so I think its pretty awesome but if you want to just download since files skip this step and go to the next one.
 
First install  ffmpeg at https://www.ffmpeg.org/
 
Then locate your download folder where all the .mp4 files are located. For example if its under “youtube-videos” you navigate there b doing this: cd /youtube-videos
 
Once you are in this directory run this script.
 
#!/bin/bash
for i in *.mp4
do
ffmpeg -i "$i" -ab 128k "${i%mp4}mp3"
done
Or if you just want to download them one by one you can just run this command.
 
youtube-dl --extract-audio --audio-format mp3 <video URL>
 
Thats about it! Its the fastest way to go about doing this without using any GUI.
 
The only thing is that this will save everything in the same directory so you will have to sort everything after its done.
 
Network Solutions – WordPress Security Update
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Network solutions has issues this email about their WordPress security update: 

As you may be aware, there are ongoing attacks against WordPress across the world. Attempts are made frequently by criminals to gain control over your WordPress blog and to then use that for their own illegal purposes. Your best protection is to make sure you maintain your WordPress installation at the latest release version and to ensure that you use a complex password that is not easily guessed. 

Why this update? 

Criminals are inventive and resourceful. Right now they are using the longstandingpingback feature in WordPress to create distributed denial of service attacks (DDOS) against third party websites. There is a high probability that your website might be used for such an attack unless you take specific action to disable pingbacks. 

What should you do? 

The recommended action is to simply install install this plugin if you use version 3.5 or later. 

More information can be found about this sort of attack on Brian Kreb’s web site. 

Or by visiting Sucuri Security’s blog posting on the subject: More Than 162,000 WordPress Sites Used for Distributed Denial of Service Attack. 

I am not an expert, where do I get help? 

If you aren’t technical (and most of us aren’t) then we would suggest you contact the person responsible for building your WordPress blog and ask them for assistance. Alternatively, you could contact NS customer service team who would be glad to assist you. 
 
Is OpenCart the right choice compared to other shopping carts ?
Is OpenCart the right choice compared to other shopping carts ?
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Is OpenCart the right choice compared to other shopping carts ?
 
It really depends on what are you planning to do and how large your shop is going to get in the future.
We have been working with many ecommerce platfroms and trust me they all have their own share of problems but after having worked with osCommerce, Magento, Prestashop, and so on, the best experience we had was with OpenCart.
 
The reasion I think it’s better is because its new and there aren’t many extensions available yet, but the way they’ve have the system working is just fantastic, it’s very easy to use, just what a non-technical people needed. We’ve developed using osCommerce for example, and Joomla + Virtuemart simply make the non-technical users go insane unless they are good in learning all the coding interface.
 
On the other OpenCart has an easy to use backend dashboard and well as store frontend. The templating system is quite intuitive and falls back on the default if you screw up anything. The core code is easily navigable and well documented as it uses MVC based PHP shopping cart.  We have recently got this integrated into many of our projects and planning to use on otehr shopping cart websites.
 
The number one reason of why we are not going with Magento, Prestashop or any other is that most users are not very technical, and don’t have much time to learn the entire ecommrece system.
 
We love working with OpenCart so if you are interested in learning more about OpenCart feel free to contact us.
 
Getting Started With OpenCart Installation
Getting Started With OpenCart Installation
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Getting Started With OpenCart Installation
 
OpenCart is one of our favrite ecommerce platforms to work with when it comes to starting an online store. It comes with tons of features and best of all its open source so anyone can download it and start using it under the GNU GPL License.
 
In this article we will provide you with detailed instructions on how to install OpenCart on your own web server. Follow these steps if you want to install a new, manual installation of the latest OpenCart version. 
 
Manual OpenCart Installation Steps
 
Step 1 – Download OpenCart (latest version)
Step 2 – Unzip and Upload the OpenCart Files to Your Server (make sure you upload whats inside the “upload folder”)
Step 3 – Create a MySQL Database for OpenCart to use (e.g oc_shop)
Step 4 – Go through the installation process (3 steps total)
Step 5 – That’s it you’re done!
 
After the installation is complete you can access your Dashboard by going to http://www.yourshop.com/admin and enter your login credentials you created on step 3.
 
If you are looking for professional OpenCart support or installation feel free to contact us and we can help you will that.
 
58% of Americans Own Smartphones
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According to Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project says that majority of Americans now own a smartphone of some sort. This data is critical if you are a business and thinking about converting your website to mobile friendly technology.
 
     
  • 55% of cell phone owners say that their phone is a smartphone. 
    •  
  • 58% of cell phone owners say that their phone operates on a smartphone platform common to the U.S. market. 
    •  
 
Combined, 61% of cellphone owners are classified as smartphone owners. What this means is that 56% of all US adults are now smartphone adopters. This is a huge opportunity for businesses to also adopt mobile strategy and server its users a mobile friendly websites. The mobile industry is evolving at a very fast rate and people are now hitting the back button if a website is not offering either a responsive design or mobile friendly version.
 
Websites for Dentists Are Becoming a Necessity
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Why having a website is crucial to your dental practice?
First and foremost its 2013 the digital age is in its maturity stage. Secondly, websites have become a marketing tool for any business not just dentists to find new business. Dental practices usually get their new patients through their insurance company or a referral form a current patient. Now that’s great but what about the rest of the population who does not have insurance or is not a friend of the current patient. Where do they go ? Well they go to the internet and search for a dentist. 
 
Most dental practices already have an established business so they are probably listed in some local directory sites such as yelp, citysquares etc. However, all that’s listed it there is the office phone number (which might or might not be correct) and the address but nothing else. How will a potential patient make up their mind only by seeing your phone number. There is also a possibility that someone has left a review there as well. 
Website for dentists Boston
Now if the dental practice had a website that people can go to, it will show them directly what the practice is about and services offered. This way you bringing people to learn more about you and eventually call to schedule an appointment. But without a website its very difficult to do since people nowadays need more info to make a decision. 
 
Another reason that dentists need their personal website is that competition has already started and most dental practices not only have a website up but its also a very good one. Other practices may be taking patients away for your practice without even realizing it.
 
Also, with smartphones more people are looking online to find new dentists and this keeps growing.
 
It is very important for a dental office, clinic, individual dentist to have a web presence in this day and age since most people expect it in a way.
 
Learn more about our dental website design and development. 
 
 
Call us at 617.855.5344 or email us at info@tripleroi.com