Advanced Access Blog

I don’t know about you, but when it comes to organization, I am pretty picky…but I don’t usually have the time to be as organized as I’d like. So I end up with piles. Piles of file folders, piles of things to file into the file folders, and then my task becomes the need to organize the piles! Is it just me?

The same thing happens with websites; it can be easy to have “piles” that you need to sort through every time you need to make a change. Sure your Virtual Office is organized, but what about the files you add? How do you name them? Do you categorize them? If not, you may be sifting through listing photos and page names just to accomplish one task.

It’s Never Too Late to Start Your “Spring Cleaning”

Websites are constantly evolving.  As we develop websites we often add, remove, or change our content, but a lot of times we don’t think of how these actions will affect us in the long run.  Many of you have built real estate websites that are “supersites”; home to hundreds of pages of content (this is a GOOD thing). But if you needed to make adjustments to one of your pages, would you know where to find it?  It’s a perfect time to get things in order, so I wanted to highlight the importance of organization and proper labeling when maintaining your website.

What’s In A Name

When you create a new page for your real estate website, it is important to make the page title relevant. The title I’m speaking of here is the one you will see in your Virtual Office Page Manager, not the title tag used for search engines and visitors. When adding a page in Page Manger, be sure to use a title that will coincide with the title you will use for a link or button on your website. You want the page to be easily found amongst the sea of pages you’ve created, and you want to be able to easily associate your website information with your Virtual Office information.  The advantage to this is easy editing for you, and if you need help with your site, Customer Support can also easily identify the page for faster assistance.  If you have added a page about a certain city, give the page the city name.  If you have added a contact form for a specific call to action give it a name relevant to the call to action, don’t just call it ‘Contact Form1′ and ‘ContactForm2′.  Use specific titles like ‘CMA Contact Form’.

This brings me to another facet of organization and naming.  Let’s say that you do have a number of related pages on your site, such as city pages or contact forms.  You should create categories for your pages and label them as ‘City Pages’ or ‘Call To Action Forms’.  This will help you keep your pages organized not only by name, but also by the type of page.

Operation Organization

Now you understand how to get organized using things like specific page titles and categories, but now you need to implement the changes to your existing site.  The best way to do this is to simply go into Page Manger and start looking at your pages.  You can rename any of your pages as needed, and group pages into a category as well.

As you review your pages, you need to start take inventory of what you have, and what you don’t need.  Are you finding pages on your site that you aren’t using anymore?  If you find pages that are outdated you might want to create a category called ‘Old Pages’ or ‘Not In Use’.  If you feel you can do away with the page completely because it was a test page or full of outdated content, it would probably be best to delete it.  Be sure you no longer need the content before you delete the page.

Even if you don’t have time to go back and reorganize your files and pages, you can use the search features we provide, and the “old standby”: CTRL+F. That keyboard shortcut will allow you to search for what you think you remember naming your pages very quickly.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009 at 5:15 pm and is filed under Weekly Marketing Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.