Building a Real Estate Site: Part 1

For the past few weeks I’ve been working on a new website for my real estate business. Designed to attract clients in the San Diego Real Estate market, I’ve managed to source many of the components, did much of the design, and now I’m moving on to the programming of the site.

I won’t say much about it except it’s a mashup of Joomla (open-source CMS), custom designed templates centered around a Yootheme template, custom joomla modules, Open Realty (real estate CMS), CMS Realty (integrates Joomla and Open Realty), and Sandicor RETS technologies.

Difficulties: Getting Joomla URLs search engine friendly and finding a blogging component that works with an SEF component for Joomla. I’ve been testing Mojo, a wordpress pluggin that works within Joomla.  The problem is that the component doesn’t allow for the use of an SEF component that makes Joomla URLs look ‘not-joomla-like’.

Solution: wordpress blog on a subdomain.  A Standalone wordpress solution with all the bells and whistles is much better than the Mojo solution. For one, all of the pluggins that you can get for wordpress, including an SEO pluggin that works wonders, will not work with Mojo.  That means with Mojo - you’re left with the Article Title being used as the page title - not the best solution in terms of SEO.

Posted by Rick Garcia in Social Media