Yep, I’m head over heals for Auttomatic’s P2 WordPress Theme.
HeyCentralPa.Com is now up and running and awaiting your participation!
Here’s what’s gone on today:
- Customized the CSS with the help of this great free palette generating tool.
- Generated A Horizontal Menu (P2 Doesn’t Come With One).
- Uploaded and Activated A Great Custom Registration Plugin and included the appropriate login/register links on the site.
- Tweaked The Main Index Template File So That The Part Showing Up Below The Pictures Would Be SEO Cool and hopefully Properly Draw In Visitors.
- Integrated The Slideoo Horizontal Flickr Sharing Script so my header would be dynamic, colorful, and engaging. (I know, probably not the best for SEO? Eric?)
Which brings me to my final feat of the day. I used the flickr integration explained in this screencast to make it dead simple for me, or any of the site’s contributors to post to the site.
So please…go ahead and give it a try by forwarding any old pic as an attachment to an email to “mores26into2blog(at)photos.flickr.com” ! [Please feel free to have fun and send some crazy stuff 🙂 — I’ll remove the test posts after we all have a good laugh…]
I’m really trying to create an environment that will make it dead simple for agents-partners and other contributors to help enhance the site with their content. So if I may ask one more favor…If you have a minute, head on over to http://heycentralpa.com then register yourself and post a comment on the home page letting me know what you think of how it’s coming so far.
Thanks much!
Mark Madsen says:
This is sweet, thanks for sharing your progress. I’ve got a similar project on the board that uses the P2 theme. I want to integrate a twitter and facebook syndication plugin as well so that we can create the content on my site and then blast it out in the social world. If I can make it to Unchained, I’d love to speak with you a little more about what you’re doing.
Thanks
mm
April 18, 2009 — 12:18 pm
Ryan Hartman says:
Mark,
I’d enjoy that. In the meantime, have you considered hooking twitterfeed up and then feeding ping.fm to accomplish this?
[I had a feeling I wasn’t the first one around here onto this p2 thing… 🙂 ]
April 18, 2009 — 12:25 pm
Trace says:
We haven’t launched yet, but we have tweaked P2 (we call it HomeBase) to work a little better for the purpose of being a central meeting place for loan processors, loan officers, title reps, escrow reps and real estate agents to communicate about mortgages in process or any project for that matter.
Loan officers and their processors can use it to keep up to date or LO’s can create them for their Realtors as a central meeting place or file depository. They can then upload marketing material, excel spreadsheets, whatever is relevant…
demo: homebase.leadpress.com
We are also playing around with it as a central place to post information for Net Branches or Banks…. this can help since when they send out emails they can get dozens or hundreds of the same emails about an announced event. If these questions are answered in a central place then readers will see the answers to their questions that have already been asked by others… It can also enable the bank to post say, CTC spreadsheets or the like without worrying about users not getting them because they end up in spam or missed… which seems to happen a lot. Users can obviously be required to used a password to access….
demo: clarion.leadpress.com
April 18, 2009 — 3:19 pm
Mark Madsen says:
Ryan – I just started looking at ping.fm. Still trying to get my head wrapped around the logistics. My main goal is to create the content on my site for SEO purposes, and then spread the word through social media for click traffic. lol, maybe I’ll get a SMMI designation when I have proof of it working.
Trace – I figured that you’d already have that part of the solution knocked out by now. Guess I should check in with you more often. Either way, as a loan officer, it would be awesome to create mini private communities and project boards within my site. I actually wanted to use P2 for a members.myfhamortgageblog.com as well. Looking forward to sharing some of these tools in November. 🙂
April 18, 2009 — 4:54 pm
Ryan Hartman says:
Trace, that’s really cool. So translated to real estate: brokers could very inexpensively set up intranets and even conveyancing portals to be shared with all transaction parties…(someone call the in house technologist again! )
Mark, basically with Ping you just set up profiles with each network, link them to ping, then each post sent through the Ping interface gets you nice juicy backlinks on all those networks.
Chris Johnson and I have been working on a service that sets this all up efficiently and affordably…a rough start is up at Guerrilla.Me
(Chris’s awesome idea and vision, but I’ll take some credit for the name…)
April 18, 2009 — 5:23 pm
Mark Madsen says:
Ryan, I’d love to hear more about how I can help you promote your Social Branding and Social Media Optimization blog to my network. Thanks for confirming that I’m headed in the right direction with ping.fm.
mm
April 18, 2009 — 6:05 pm