Due to the size of the Atlanta market, there are probably 35 or more IDX providers.

I diligently went through EVERY one of them back in December and chose Diverse Solutions.

There was only one that was arguably better but it only came with a full suite for running an entire brokerage and costs $40k!

I’ve now got a backlog of projects for my site and I’m about to get the web developer hat back on for a few days.

The one thing I am missing is a really good MLS search. The ones I like, like Diverse Solutions you have, is not available for my MLS. The ones that are here don’t play well yet with WP. Most even force you to open a new window on their site.

FWIW, I spent a lot of time in Atlanta with IBM in a previous life.

Visited your site. Nice work. I like the logo. I’ve got my kids going in a logo making contest for my site right now.

I switched from a static/php hand coded site a few months ago over to WordPress. The only thing I miss about the old site is the raw blazing SPEED of the thing, near-instanteneous. WP can be very slow at times.

The flexability and availability of add-ons, plugins, widgets, etc., for wordpress makes it all so enjoyable.

I see you are using a fairly skinny size for your site. It’s almost the exact same width as mine. I see a lot of other sites MUCH wider than both of ours.

Thinking about that some. Yours is looking a little cramped with all the goodies on there. If I add much more to mine, I’ll need to go wider.

BTW, I lived in The triangle from 1994-1999.

RM

I’m busy every day jsut trying to get my lowly site to rank well enough in the SERPS.

getting left behind.

One such MLS is the Wilmington, NC MLS. I just met with an IDX company today who said they had just dropped support for the Wilmington MLS. Apparently the MLS has decided to start charging every IDX vendor $30/month per customer for their feed. This appears to be an effort to make the Wilmington MLS’s own offering more competitive and drive away competition.

Why some local memberships make some of the decisions they do is beyond me. The system needs to be re-worked.

I agree with what Marc says, “access to all listings is still the heart of any search experience” Still a novice in this arena and one who’s yet to use these tools, I wonder how much this technology will matter to a consumer based on what Marc shared?

As a test, I selected a couple of keywords and long tail search terms that I wanted to test out. I made sure that the blog post I did included those keywords and terms. I used the Posterous.com sight to aggregate the post to various other supporting sites and social media. I did this for certain post, but not all as not every post was appropriate to every social site.

After a couple of weeks, my site was the top site for the search terms I was targeting. And the other sites where I also posted to were on page one as well. Now I am formatting the e-mail I send to Posterous to include appropriate backlinks from all the sites. This coupled with the SEO plug-ins has really opened my eyes to the possibility.

I understand SEO done this way is just part of the equation, but the rich content possibilities and huge plug-in library should make it very practical to create some very engaging real-estate websites.

One plug-in I have been using is the Local Market Explorer. Once you have applied for and received API keys from the partner websites (Zillow, Flickr, Yelp, etc.), you can use LME to create a page mashup of the information. Depending on your geography, the information can be very local, down to the individual neighborhood even. You can even tag your blog post to be pulled in to the page for a certain area.

I can easily see the ability to geocode data so when you do a search of an area or look at details of a listing it pulls a mashup of the area together to give someone a complete view.

These are very exciting times indeed. Now if I can just find a killer IDX partner that also works with my local MLS. That is the current challenge.

Barrett