I am not a geek!
I like geeks. I get along with geeks, but I ain’t one. Let’s just get that out of the way up front and now you know where I coming from.
I’m a lucky girl; I’ve been playing with engenu. I’ve been on board with the idea of engenu since I first heard about it. It’s very exciting for a lot of reasons, some have been discussed here, but I’m sure there are other uses for engenu that we will discover the more we use it.
You really need to understand that I’m not a geek. On the DISC profile, I’m an ‘I’ with a healthy dose of ‘D’. ‘C’ barely registers. I cannot explain how engenu works so if that is something that is important to you then I shall direct you here. One other thing I want to make clear- Greg didn’t ask me to write about this. I’m writing this because I’m assuming that there is someone else sitting out there reading Bloodhound because you are hungry for something different, something that can differentiate you and the way you do business, and something that gives you control over your marketing. You might be looking at engenu saying to yourself, “easy for you to say Mr. Swann, but what about me?” Me too. All that php and html and whatever else is something I should learn, and should know, and some day I probably will- through osmosis if nothing else- but today I simply want to know what’s in it for me and my clients, and I want it to be easy to use or I’m going to bail.
Well, I’m happy to report that I have been using engenu to help some first time buyers relocating from Florida. They are not looking for suburban starters, they want to get their hands dirty and rehab a historic home. Not too much rehabbing, but they are looking for the charm, the character of older homes and they want to share that love with their neighbors. We talked about the pros and cons of several areas, and they’ve settled on South Park. No, not Park”>that South Park, Historic South Park in Dayton. As an aside, even though they are determined to look at historic homes in the city of Dayton, they found me through my blog, “TheBrickRanch.com; Exploring Huber Heights, brick by brick”. That title didn’t scare them off? Here’s a quote from one of their emails: “I believe open communication rules the world.” Nope, a low maintenance affordable brick ranch is not what they are looking for, but a Dayton Ohio real estate agent who believes in the power of communicating, is.
These clients need to know the details of what is available. They don’t know the area, they don’t know the streets. They need to know if the people next door to the house that looks so lovely on R.com, are growing a spare car part garden in their backyard. They can’t see that what’s behind door #2 is a non-working and completely destroyed bathroom. They also can’t see that the home that they overlooked because of it’s plain exterior has all new windows and has a sealed and clean and dry 130 year old basement, and sits on a boulevard. I could tell them all that, but isn’t it better to show them? Like Greg says, we talk in pictures.
I’m not a geek! New technology doesn’t thrill me unless I can make it productive somehow and even then, it better be easy to use. I’ve understood the power of engenu but was very concerned that it would be too complicated for me to use. But, since I have a very good reason to use engenu, I jumped tiptoed in.
Lo and behold! engenu is easy to use. In fact, the toughest part for me was figuring out how to FTP my photos- if in fact, that’s what I’m doing to my photos, I’m not really clear about that. The beauty part is this: It doesn’t matter if I know what all this is called, I can create something for my clients. I can talk in pictures! I have made one site with four separate slide shows for them so far- very similar to what Greg has shown you here. But last night I whipped up a little engenu page for my own amusement. What took time is choosing the photos, editing them, and writing captions. The “engenu” part takes seconds- Oh thank god! If you’ll indulge me a comparison, if you use Real Estate Shows, it’s very similar to working with that. The difference, and it’s an important difference if you are farming an area or a particular style of home, is that you can use keywords in the titles and descriptions (note to self: Use keywords in your titles!), which will forever link your website to those words. Hooray! Another round of Google juice for everyone! Personally, I think using both tools would be a really powerful and beneficial weapon to have in your arsenal.
You wanna see my little slide show? This .5 hr effort on my part will probably take you 10 minutes tops. Have no fear- geeky tools for ‘I’s are here! Without further delay: Historic Charm (note to self: gotta use those keywords…)
Greg Swann says:
Bless you, Teri.
I wrote engenu because of this post — specifically this text:
I realized that I would bore everyone to death before I explained how to do this stuff, and, even then, they’d still only know how to do things manually. We had changes that we wanted to make to Slide Show Marge, so I just started over from a brand new architecture.
Inlookers, I’m still at least a few days away from being ready to release a public beta of engenu, but documentation is coming together at engenu.us. Every new site I’ve shown you since February 16th was produced by engenu, but the biggest example, so far, is the single-property web site for 1322 East Vermont Avenue. That whole site was built in engenu just as you see it, with no manual HTML manipulation. Much of it was done by Cathleen, who knows almost no HTML.
April 9, 2008 — 6:50 pm
John Kalinowski says:
I can’t stand it any longer!!! Engenu sounds like the missing link I’ve need for a long time. Can’t wait to try it out!
April 9, 2008 — 7:03 pm
Brian Miller says:
Oh man, this tool sounds incredible. I read about it a couple weeks ago, and got fired up. Then I read Teri’s post here. I’ve subscribed to services that allow me to creat single property sites, these work pretty well, but the flexibility and the power that seems to be available with engenu. when do we get to use it?
April 10, 2008 — 5:39 am
Teri Lussier says:
The exciting part for me is going to be watching and learning from how other people use it. I think we are going to see some incredible and creative ideas that I never could have thought of.
That collective learning and sharing that takes place with new products is really what pushes things forward- very fun and exciting.
April 10, 2008 — 5:56 am
Brian Miller says:
ok, maybe it’s the coffee, but i’m really pumped about using this. can “confidential” web sites be created, too? I’m thinking like say my buyer and the seller have agreed on the deal. Now, some issues come up – i need to go take some photos, maybe a pdf of a document needs to be shared, etc. Using engenu as a library of pertinent documents on a transaction could be really helpful, but obviously only certain persons should be able to view.
April 10, 2008 — 6:28 am
Greg Swann says:
> can “confidential” web sites be created, too?
Hi, Brian. Sorry, the answer to that question is no. The web is not secure, not at all. With encryption, you can slow the bad guys down, but not by a whole lot. I know there are vendors who offer encrypted sites for client communication. We played with similar ideas privately (not for engenu), but I couldn’t come up with a way of working that didn’t cause more trouble than I thought it was worth. This is definitely a market opportunity, painless inbound and outbound access to a strongly-encrypted web site.
April 10, 2008 — 8:14 am