I’ve been talking about engenu for a couple of months now. This is the software that BloodhoundRealty.com uses to build single property web sites for our listings and other web pages and web sites that we use to communicate with clients and vendors. Our belief is that the language of real estate is photography, and that, in many cases, the most effective way of communicating real estate concepts is by means of web pages and web sites.
I have been building pages and sites like this for as long as I have been in real estate, first manually, then with a steadily improving series of software programs. engenu is a further development on those ideas, designed and written from scratch this year. We have been using it for our own jobs for the past two months — to make sure that we had what we wanted, and to makes sure everything was working properly.
Here are some engenu sites we have built, both as live work and as examples of what the software can do:
- 1322EastVermontAve.com, a single-property web site
- 12214WestMadisonSt.com, a single-property web site
- An elaborate property preview for a relocating client
- Unchained Hotels, an example of an embedded Google map
- A demonstration of more-elaborate HTML coding
- The supporting web site for a blog post about another agent’s listing
What is it, exactly? engenu is slide-show-oriented software for the semi-automated creation of web pages and web sites. It is communications software, not a presentation package. As an expression of this, even though we make very elaborate single-property web sites for our listings, we continue to use a third-party vendor for our virtual tours.
Who should use engenu? Realtors — and I mean all of them — but also handymen, roofers, landscapers, inspectors — anyone who needs to communicate frequently with digital photographs.
What will you need to run engenu? Root level access to an Apache web server, a robust FTP client that you know how to use, and a strong need to create a lot of professional-looking web pages quickly and cheaply. engenu is multi-user software, so, as soon as you have it installed, you can split the workload for large sites among co-workers. An engenu web site can be edited from any web browser on any computer anywhere in the world.
Teri Lussier has written about her experience with engenu, and we’ve talked about it quite a bit over the last couple of months. If you’d like to take it out for a test drive, here’s what you need to do:
- Go to engenu.us, the web site for the software
- Register and download the software
- Follow the instructions for uploading engenu to your file server
- RTFM if you’re the manual-reading type
- Build yourself some web sites
This is a beta test, so there may turn out to be undiscovered bugs in the software. But we have been pushing it as hard as we can, with good results. Moreover, nothing that turns up from here will break any sites you might build now with engenu, so I entreat you to deploy the software on serious projects. If there are any lingering bugs, they’ll turn up in live work. And, if not, you will have knocked out a lot of live work.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing, real estate photography, technology
John Kalinowski says:
Greg – Can’t thank you enough for what you’re doing, and for this new product!
April 23, 2008 — 5:34 am
Greg Swann says:
> Greg – Can’t thank you enough for what you’re doing, and for this new product!
Bless you, sir. Thank you.
Any hiccoughs on the installation?
Show us your sites as you build them.
April 23, 2008 — 6:04 am
Ryan Hartman says:
Greg-
Wow, this is really interesting. I’ve got a load to do today, but am gonna fiddle with engeneu for a little while because I can see how this could save us a ton of time!
I’m curious to know how installing this alongside wordpress will affect our overall SEO effort? (internal linking, etc) Or, should we not be so concerned with how separate property sites will enhance overall quality effectiveness of our main marketing blog? (I guess what I really mean is, is there any benefit to keeping content all within the same CMS?)
If you have a second to comment on this, would be much appreciated. In the meantime, thanks much! (How the &!*%& do you find time for all this stuff 🙂
April 23, 2008 — 7:06 am
Greg Swann says:
> I’m curious to know how installing this alongside wordpress will affect our overall SEO effort?
engenu itself is designed to produce small, tight, fast, highly-spiderable pages. We’re squeezing the most juice we can out of every bit of content we have. For example, if you caption a photo, that caption will be encoded automatically as that photo’s ALT tag. The same kind of thing is happening with folder and PDF links.
As for linking between engenu and WordPress, I’m for it. In WordPress, you can create the teaser for the full engenu site. Here’s an example of that, me blogging another’s agent’s listing, using the blog post to direct interested parties to the much richer engenu site. The links reinforce each other, which should add strength to them all.
I think the third piece of this is what to do about hosting single-property web sites. This is something we could explore in BloodhoundBlog. We use the street address: 123WestMulberrySt.com. This doesn’t have any short-term Google advantage, but it works well for direct entry. In the long-run, those sites become breadcrumbs leading back to us. Ryan Ward is leaning toward something like PeachtreeHeights.com, with one site being used iteratively for multiple listings. This will draw on the seasoning of the site as it ages. An idea we hit on last week: Using sub-domains like 123WestMulberrySt.com.BloodhoundRealty.com. We have infinite free subdomains with our hosting package, so the cost is nothing. We would still buy the street address and redirect, if only because it will fit on the signage. Would sites like that inherit the master domain’s Google juice? That’s the dispositive question. The same idea might work even better as subdirectories.
The meta question: Which is better for search WRT your WordPress weblog? I think a real estate weblog should be a blogsite, with the static selling pages linked in from the toolbar. Then the single-property web sites can be linked out from the Featured Listings page. The overall site gets the weblog advantage with search engines, and the single-property web sites get queued to be spidered in a sprightly fashion.
For all of me, if you want to get maximum mileage our of an engenu/WordPress marriage, blog your listings, linking back tot he engenu site.
There’s a lot more. We have big needs, so we built a tool that handles big jobs. I’ll have one very big SEO-dominance trick to show off at Unchained.
April 23, 2008 — 7:56 am
Ryan Hartman says:
Thanks much. I think this will be a bit more effective than our current strategy of placing listings on subpages of subpages (such as leedphilly.com or philadelphianewconstruciton.com) because it’ll make our sellers feel a little more special 🙂
[Also I’m having issues getting figuring out where our top level directory is on the install. I’m copying files to public_html which is where our wordpress installs sit, but it’s not working. Maybe it’s a host issue?)
April 23, 2008 — 8:06 am
Greg Swann says:
> I’m having issues getting figuring out where our top level directory is on the install. I’m copying files to public_html which is where our wordpress installs sit, but it’s not working. Maybe it’s a host issue?
Try this:
Copy this line of text:
Paste it into a plain text file and name it kilroy.html.
FTP that file into what you think is the top HTTP level of your server.
Then go to:
If that works, you’re there, and we have a different problem.
If not, kill kilroy.html from the sever and try again in a different location.
April 23, 2008 — 8:16 am
Ryan Hartman says:
The test worked (on my public.html, which is where I have the engenu folders).
But still a 404 on “/engenu” I guess is a different problem. Thanks for such quick support.
April 23, 2008 — 8:28 am
Greg Swann says:
The next thing to try is permissions on the server. Cathy had a problem with the CyberDuck FTP client, but I wasn’t sure if it was something we might see again.
Your permissions fro both folders should look like this:
Depending on how your FTP client sets permissions, you may just need to set them to 755.
April 23, 2008 — 8:35 am
Ryan Hartman says:
Greg. This is most likely my fault. My permissions were set ok, but for some reason everything was sitting like this “/engenu/engenu” and “engenucomponents/engenucomponents. Fix was as simple as moving the files over.
[Hope this helps someone else :]
Really excited to start playing!
April 23, 2008 — 8:57 am
Greg Swann says:
I have to work that out, or at least document for it. It happened that way with Teri Lussier, but I thought I had it fixed by building the zip files on a Windows machine. I’ll come back to it tonight. Meanwhile, if someone else has this problem, try Ryan’s solution.
April 23, 2008 — 9:01 am
Ryan Hartman says:
Ok, who do we pay for a custom skin?
April 23, 2008 — 6:24 pm
Ryan Hartman says:
Here’s our first try. http://philadelphiarealestatehub.com/101.
(Anyone who wants to make a 30% referral on a 4 Million Dollar Philly Penthouse, send your wealthy friends my way 🙂
April 23, 2008 — 7:18 pm
Greg Swann says:
Bug news, 4/24/08: We had a problem on some servers (Bluehost.com at least) where you would get stuck at the log-in page. If you experienced this on the release version of engenu, download a fresh copy of engenu.zip and install it over your current version.
April 24, 2008 — 12:35 am
David Sherfey says:
Greg…I read the RTFM and now I think I understand. It sounds like the efficiency of the process alone will make it worth someone buying Apache server space just to host engenu (we’re on goaddy right now). This of course would not be an ideal solution, but it would be worth it if you want to take care of your buyers and sellers.
Bravo!
April 24, 2008 — 4:50 am
Greg Swann says:
> It sounds like the efficiency of the process alone will make it worth someone buying Apache server space just to host engenu (we’re on goaddy right now).
Indeed. If you don’t already have it, you can set up Linux hosting on Godaddy.com for $49 a year. Toss in a new domain and you’re still under sixty bucks a year.
April 24, 2008 — 6:44 am
Greg Swann says:
> Here’s our first try. http://philadelphiarealestatehub.com/101.
Wow, what a beautiful home…
April 24, 2008 — 7:16 am
Lee Mason says:
I had trouble installing engenu using Godaddy hosting. Turns out the php.ini file (located in the root directory) needed to be changed to read:
allow_url_fopen = on
where it originally said “off”. works fine now.
April 24, 2008 — 9:13 am
Greg Swann says:
> Turns out the php.ini file (located in the root directory) needed to be changed to read:
> allow_url_fopen = on
> where it originally said “off”. works fine now.
Thanks! I’ll see if I can default that in the source.
April 24, 2008 — 9:16 am
Jay says:
It’s funny. I have 200 page website and I don’t know how to FTP. Can you say lame? Maybe some day I’ll get an FTPing for dummies book or something.
J
April 24, 2008 — 6:19 pm
Greg Swann says:
> Maybe some day I’ll get an FTPing for dummies book or something.
Just snag an FTP client and start playing. Taking control of your file server is liberating.
April 24, 2008 — 6:42 pm
David Sherfey says:
>you can set up Linux hosting on Godaddy.com for $49 a year
Thanks! Yes, it is amazing what you can learn when you actually read stuff. I learned that I can actually switch my operating system from Windows to Linux if I want to (and may).
April 24, 2008 — 6:53 pm
Brian Miller says:
woo hoo !! finally, i figured this out and now have engenu installed on my site!! Pretty easy once I open my eyes and actually read this instructions. hopefully I can display some of my first creations later today.
April 27, 2008 — 8:10 am
Greg Swann says:
> woo hoo !! finally, i figured this out and now have engenu installed on my site!! Pretty easy once I open my eyes and actually read this instructions.
Good on ya! When I get a chance, I’ll rewrite the installation instructions. That might help, too. 😉
> hopefully I can display some of my first creations later today.
Looking forward to it.
April 27, 2008 — 8:12 am
Brian Miller says:
Greg, dang. what am i doing wrong? I type in RealEstateEntropy.com/engenu, I enter password and I’m in. I can see the folder I uploaded (it has an amber light) along with some files that are part of my site.
I click on the uploaded file (which is a bunch of **.jpg, and **.pdf files) When the engenu “editor” opens I don’t see the photos and any changes I make in the header, etc. don’t seem to “stick” after I click on the save button.
I uploaded this folder into the same directory as the engenu folders
April 27, 2008 — 11:31 am