by Kris Cone | Jun 23, 2010 | What's New
Hello FloorPlanOnline Customers
I would like to take a few moments to get your thoughts on the new and old tour formats to help guide our summer development efforts. Please click here to open up the short survey.
You will also get an email on this topic and there will also be an online message once you are logged in, so please only complete the survey one time.
Thank you in advance for your help in making FloorPlanOnline the most robust tour in the marketplace!
Sincerely,
Kris Cone
by Kris Cone | May 28, 2010 | Listing Tools, Tour Updates
Want to really be a local area expert? Try creating an Area Tour for the subdivision, community, town, or city you service. Once you have the Area Tour, you can use the new Additional Resources linking tools to add it to each of your listings.
You can easily showcase an area just with photos, or if you have a map you would like to use, you can make it an interactive map tour. Click Here for an example of an Area Tour created by the first official customer of FloorPlanOnline in the US, Linda Cone of the Cone Team. See more of Linda at www.KansasCityLifestyles.com. Note – we provide both a widescreen version of the tour and a portrait version. By default people get the widescreen – except some users with a very narrow screen will get the portrait version. In this case, I think the portrait version works good for a map tour…so I used that. Just change the 1 to a 0 to see and use the portrait version at the end after ws= http://www.seetheproperty.com/presentation_v2/presentation.php?order_id=8606&mode=branded&ws=0 We will be adding some Map tour types in the future…but for now, you can work the system this way.
To see a tour with the Area Tour (and a lot more Additional Resources), click here.
How do you add an Area Tour to your tours? It is simple. First, just create a new tour for the area you would like to showcase. To create a self service Area Tour with photos, it is just $29 for a year of hosting. Just select the tour option for Photos only. To add a Map, select the FloorPlan and Photos option. That is just $59 for the first year to create the map and tour, and then $29 a year thereafter.
One you have the Area Tour, just login, go to Manage Orders and then click the Edit link under Order Form (or Edit Tour then edit Property Details). Scroll down to the section where it says Content Display Options. Under the Additional Resources column, select the +Add Custom Resource button. Then just type in text for how you want it to show on your tour, and then the link to the Area Tour, such as www.floorplanonline.com/8606 (or www.seetheproperty.com/8606 works too). Then select the button to add it. Just make sure the box is checked for this Area Tour, go to the bottom and save. For your next tour, this resource should be checked.
If you service different areas, you can add multiple area tours, and just select the one needed for your particular listing.
Also, you can use the Additional Resource tools to add links to your website, your blog, your MLS search page, and more. The more you put links back to your website, the more “Google Juice” you get…and we both get. Just check out the link above to the listing with the Area Tour for an example.
by Kris Cone | May 25, 2010 | Real Estate Info
Joint Base Lewis-McChord, the third largest base in the United States welcomes home this summer 18,000 troops at roughly the same time from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Homecomings are special, especially for the moms and dads walking into the arms of their families. But for 7,500+ single soldiers, often their first night home is inside a bare, bleak barracks room. With combat stress and other mental pressures, sometimes this is a recipe for disaster.
The Fort Lewis Chapter of the Association of the United States Army plans to change that by raising enough money and supplies to give each returning single soldier a welcome home basket in their rooms. We want to make up their beds, give them snacks and water, stock their bathrooms and provide as homey a homecoming as we can. These are mostly teenagers and early 20-somethings with big appetites arriving home late at night when the chow halls are closed. We need snack and microwavable products, non-perishable with expiration’s good through August, 2010.
Any cash donation or product donation goes a long way. You can imagine the support we need to fill 7,500 barracks rooms with the love our returning heroes deserve. Please give generously. You will be recognized for your contribution in a special edition of the Ranger and Airlifter newspapers publishing June 3, 2010, AND in an insert going inside each barrack’s basket.
The Association of the United States Army – Fort Lewis Chapter is a 501(c)3 so the donation is tax deductible. You can send the money to AUSA Fort Lewis, c/o The Ranger newspaper, P.O. Box 98801, Lakewood, WA 98496. Any questions, and to coordinate delivery of items, please contact Denise Dhane at (253) 686-1505 or denisedhane@yahoo.com, Carlene Joseph at Carlene.Joseph@Harborstone.com, or (253) 312-9279, or Ken Swarner at (253) 584-1212 or publisher@ftlewisranger.com. We hope to hear from you soon. Our soldiers start returning home at the beginning of June.
Sincerely yours,
Ken Swarner
Publisher
The Fort Lewis Ranger/NW Airlifter/Weekly Volcano/NW Veteran/Swarner PR
253.584.1212
northwestmilitary.com
weeklyvolcano.com
by Kris Cone | May 15, 2010 | Real Estate Info
We have made a development fix for the new tour and its support for Internet Explorer 6. There was an issue with the new tour layout and users who have Internet Explorer 6 (IE 6) installed as their web browser – these users could not see some of the content and formatting. IE 6 is an old, outdated version that does not support some of the functionality and features on the new tour format.
With the fix, we now detect the browser of the user, and if they have IE 6 on their computer, we will show the old tour format to that user vs the new tour format. This will ensure the user sees the content of the tour…it will just be in a different format. As long as you created the tour in the new format, this browser detection is automatically supported – you do not need to do anything.
If you are using IE 6, we strongly recommend you upgrade to the latest version of Internet Explorer – version 8 and also upgrade your flash player, or download Firefox. Firefox is a great alternative to IE. It is generally faster as well and has some customization capabilities. You can download Firefox at www.firefox.com. Please also install the Adobe Flash (to see the tour content) and Adobe Reader (to view PDF files) plugins. Please note Microsoft is ending its support for IE 6 completely in July…so if you have it, your computer is going to have a very high security risk for getting viruses, malware and spyware. We STRONGLY recommend you upgrade.
We are also working on some fixes to the content area that we hope to have live next week, that include automatically adjusting the content area for the screen size so the content area is always visible on the screen and we show the photos side by side with the floorplan. Currently, if you have a narrower screen size (for example 1024×768) we show the embedded floorplan view which has photos popping on top of the floorplan.
Thanks for the feedback and as always, your business!
-Kris Cone
by Kris Cone | May 6, 2010 | Real Estate Info
I wanted to thank everyone for the positive and negative feedback on the new tour layout. Some people love it…some people do not. Let me address some issues, and resolution to the issues.
1. Floor plan view – first…some people are not seeing the floorplan side-by-side with photos (similar to the old tour view). The reason is we have a screen resolution detection feature to show a different view to some users based on their computer screen, and right now, it is set to not show the right tour for some users. We are changing this by the end of this week, so i
f your screen is 1000 pixels or wider, you will see the floor plan side-by-side with photos. If your screen is less than 1200 pixels (which is less than 2% of users, per our statistics), then you will see an embedded floor plan view where the photos show on top of the floor plan. To see your screen resolution on a Windows computer, just right click your mouse on your desktop and then either select Screen Resolution (Windows 7) or Properties, then Settings (Windows XP).
The floor plan side-by-side photos view should look like this screen shot….photo on the left, floor plan on the right. The floor plan can also be zoomed in.
2. Content window and scrolling. We understand some people may need to scroll to see all the content window. We are working on making an adjustment to the content window to make it a little smaller if your screen height is 900 pixels or less, which should reduce the need for scrolling. If you have many toolbars on your browser, you may still have to scroll….but you can disable the toolbar by removing them under VIEW, Toolbars and un-check those you do not need.
by Kris Cone | May 3, 2010 | Real Estate Info, Real Estate News, Technology
Hi FloorPlanOnline Customers!
Well, the dust has settled from our weekend release of the new tour. The release went surprisingly well….probably one of the best releases we have ever done in terms of few issues and the issues getting fixed quickly. I did want to point out a few things that have come up today regarding the new tour and tour conversion.
1. Portrait vs Wide-screen View. Depending on your screen resolution, you may see a little different content view for photos, video and the floor plan. If you have a screen resolution of 1024 pixels wide or less, you should see the “Portrait” version of the tour, which has photos in a 4:3 aspect ratio (similar to the old TV size before we had wide-screen TVs) and the Floor Plan View is the embedded floor plan vs the side by side floor plan view. We have set it up this way because the content would have to be very small or it will run off the page to the right. So to provide users with these screen resolutions the best view, we alter what they see to the Portrait view. Users with screen resolutions larger than 1024 will see the Wide-screen view which has photos in a 3:2 aspect ratio (what most digital SLRs shoot today) and 16:9 photos will be supported with an ability to mouse around the photo. In addition, the Floor Plan View will have the photos (here they are in a 4:3 aspect ratio) side by side with the floor plan, similar to the old tour view. You can always change a Portrait version to a wide-screen by adding &ws=1 to the end of the tour lnk, such as www.seetheproperty.com/presentation_v2/presentation.php?order_id=61383&mode=branded&ws=1 ….so if you do see the portrait version, you can see how the Wide-screen will look.
We have noticed that on some computers, the widescreen version is not showing up as the default view when it should be…the Portrait version is, so that is something we are working to fix.
2. FloorPlan/Photo Icon issue for tours created between April 15th and April 30th. For tours produced between April 15th and April 30th, we have done some work to ready the floor plan for the new tour by making a version of it in Flash, so it can be zoomed in if it is used in the new tour. Right now, if you convert a tour produced during this time frame to the new FPO 2.0 format, the floorplan on the tour is automatically changing to this flash version. This causes all of the photo icons on the floor plan to be mis-placed because it is a different size and file type. Therefore, be aware that if we convert the tour, the photos may need to be repositioned. You can do this for free or we can do this for the $20 conversion fee – if this issue was brought up to you before the conversion. We are working on a fix here.
3. Content Area View-ability. On some computers you may not be able to see the complete content area without scrolling. We are aware of this issue and are working on a fix to adjust the size of the content window if your vertical screen resolution is 900 pixels or less. We will make the content area a little smaller so it fits on the screen without scrolling.
4. Some Internet Explorer Issues. On some computers, the Photos and Video may not load…you may get a blank area. It appears to be an issue with Adobe Flash. The simple fix is go to www.adobe.com and download the most recent version of Flash. Install the update, close out your browser window, and then open it up again and try the tour. This seems to fix the problem. We are investigating what changed, as it was fine last week….this could have been caused by a recent Windows Update. The tour works in Firefox, Chrome and Safari. Go figure…another issue with Microsoft software???
We have had some great comments so far. Please send us comments, testimonials, complaints and more!
Cheers
-Kris Cone
