March Roundup.....

Hello everyone....!!

March has been madness and ended with a bang back here in the 'behind the scenes" world of Homeowner Services. It seems with every month we just get better and better, while the idea pool just gets deeper still. In our never ending mission of combining a great user experience, along with a superior real estate advertising venue, upgrades and new installations are everywhere.

Some Examples...

1. Better Search Results
We have refined our search results to better match searched criteria, while still limiting available search options to a minimum in order to allow more of your listings to be considered by buyers, and reduce the hoops that buyers have to jump through on some sites to perform any type of real estate search. Some may say that our searches are "simple", yet they are fabulous from the standpoint that they don't permit buyers to otherwise exclude listings from consideration based upon criteria that is often not a deal breaker in making a choice to purchase a specific home.

2. Better Browser Compatibility
Though not deployed in entirety yet, we have adopted a new CSS, XHTML document model and process to take us even further in cross browser compatibility. With recent releases of Google Chrome, IE8 and a continued migration of users switching over to Firefox and Opera it only made sense. As an added bonus, the side affect of all of this if there were one, is that it will further assist us in our move forward to mobile devices. (Another story, another time)

3. Better Administrative Services
Expansion and simplification of our admin panels is allowing us to respond faster to issues, run more efficient, and just be easier to use. By the time we release our realtor admin areas they will have had months of beta testing under their belts, and should be some of the easiest to use in the industry.

4. Better School Information
It has just been in the last week that we have been granted permission from GreatSchools.com to modify their widget code to place within our listing details pages in a manner previously unseen. Though we have not worked out the details of the "where we are going to do it" on the sites, this will be an upgrade coming in the months ahead as we re-visit sections of the site for the browser compatibility upgrades.

5. Better Feeds
Further development in our data structure and xml feeds are currently being tweaked to bring us up to par with the online real estate standards agreement for which Yahoo, Trulia, Zillow, Oodle, Vast, Point2 Technologies, and others started adopting mid 2008. This new standard is interoperable with the recent RETS (Real Estate Transaction Standard) and will further expand our base of syndication partners. This week alone two new feeds tested in compliance with the standard and we now are our own pipeline to Oodle.com and Vast.com which makes your new listings on our site available faster to the national and global search communities as we update our feeds to the online community every day.

6. Craigslist Support
With little fanfare (yet) March seen the development, testing and now the deployment of our Craigslist Poster application. This great tool will be available through the realtor admin panel, and will provide our advertisers with code that can be copied and pasted into Craigslist for promoting your listings. We might also mention that we have searched the largest real estate markets from coast-to-coast and have not found another product available that provides anything equal to it in style or function. These ads will provide direct linking back to your listing details page, and your virtual tour. If you are an experienced Craigslist user, you will find that adding your listing can be done in under 20 seconds, and the results are just stunning.

As an added bonus to your advertising package, Homeowner Services is posting your first ad for you as part of our 'new listing' production cycle! Just another way we thank you for your loyalty to our publications.

7. Electronic Magazine (ePub)
Our online ePub (Digital Magazine) has received a complete overhaul in March going from a static duplicate of our printed publication, to a combination of dynamic data driven pages and static page copies. The benefit for you is that if you received a new listing after our publication date, even though your listing will not appear in the printed book, it will be included in the online live version! From a user standpoint it also loads faster and does away with the fully linear browsing method as a number of pre-determined viewing options are available. Support and auxiliary pages are all that is left to wrap this one up with full deployment coming in April.

8. Better Modularization
Always learning from out mistakes and experiences, we are always in the process of advancing modularization of our services and site areas so that advancements and new services can be deployed from portal to portal with minimum impact to existing structure. While this may mean little to advertisers or users, it allows us to migrate and add services from portal to portal with minimal worry of errors, days worth of portal testing, and in general provide you with a better venue for your advertising dollars.

In Closing...

So, there you have it. A busy month indeed. We'll sign off now and get back to the coding again, but before we do let us say this. A couple of the items above were in direct response to requests, ideas, or thoughts from our advertisers who suggested ways they felt things might be better. Let it be known that we listen, and when we conclude they are right, we take measurable action to improve. Let us know how we can serve you better, as we are always looking for ways to be the best service out there.