Using WordPress for Your Real
Estate Websites and Blogs.
Have you considered using WordPress to manage your Real Estate Wesite or Blog ? If not, you should give it a look !
You can have a free WordPress hosted website or Blog, but here, we are recommending a self hosted WordPress Website or Blog.
When you self-host your sites using WordPress as your Content Manager you get a whole host of options and settings you can customize, as well as thousands of free plugins you can use on your sites.
Some Plugins are specifically geared towards real estate agents, but most are there to help you manage your site, or to help you add images quickly without knowing any code.
Here are the steps to take to set up your first real estate website or blog using the self-hosted option.
1. Make sure you have a domain name you want to use with your new website or blog, and access to change the DNS Settings.
2. Sign up for your own hosting account, and I recommend using Hostgator for your hosting needs, it’s who I use.
When you have your hosting account in place, they will send you an email confirming your account is active, and they will provide you with the Domain Name Servers. These are the two names which will be a bunch of numbers like …….. NS…followed by some numbers.
Your Domain Name must point to these servers to work with your hosting account and WordPress when you have it set up. You will log-in to the account where you bought your domain name and simply change the DNS to your new server numbers.
Once you have pointed your domain name to these servers, you can now login to your Hosting Account’s Control Panel and use the quick launch tools there to easily hook up your new domain name to WordPress.
There will be some set-up information you will need to enter, create passwords etc….then your WordPress Website or Blog will be up-and-running within minutes.
You will see a link to go view your new WordPress Website…click on that and bookmark it for later use. You can then navigate around the WordPress Content Manager and Dashboard to start setting up your site exactly the way you want it.
WordPress has some default information already there for you, but you can remove/delete a lot of this…things like a sample page, a sample post etc…
Search through all the WordPress Themes and choose one you like…then activate it to see how it looks…don’t like it…simply download another theme and see what it looks like.
This is your basic guide to get yourself up-and-running with a Self Hosted WordPress website or Blog for your real estate business.
More articles will follow to help you get more out of your new WordPress sites.