I created the following WordPress theme for a commercial real estate service approximately 18 months ago.  It is not available for download or purchase.

Commercial real estate (CRE) firms like residential real estate firms typically have a brand that immediately provides name recognition, e.g., Coldwell Banker, Keller Williams, and RE/MAX for residential real estate, with Colliers, CB Richard Ellis, and Grubb & Ellis for commercial real estate.

There are a great many WordPress themes out there that could be used for commercial or residential real estate websites along with one of the WordPress real estate plug-ins or direct link to a MLS service typically using an iframe to embed listings.  Another option would be to create custom templates to display information in a variety of ways especially for in-house listings or for small real estate agencies that might not be a member of a MLS, or a way for an agent to highlight his or her listings.

I am currently working on a custom design for an real estate agent in Florida (residential) that uses Diverse Solutions to pull in listings from the Florida MLS service.

I’d love to create a custom design and theme for you. Click here to get started.

Custom Design and Custom WordPress Theme, Highly Customized Templates, Custom Menu

Additional Commercial Design (sorry no demo)

Additional Real Estate Related Posts

• Real Estate Website Design
• Real Estate Website Converted to WordPress

Valerie Sheppeard-Hankins of Coral Beach Realty USVI came to me to move her website to a new host as well as setup it up on a platform that would allow her to maintain it.  As time was limited a redesign was not done.

A custom write panel was created in order to provide detailed information about a property that displays the property’s details.  Each real estate listing can be assigned to multiple categories, e.g., Featured Listing, Subdivision/Estate, type of property.

For the “Hot Description” conditional statements are used so a different design can highlight the property (Just Reduced, Just Listed, and Back on the Market).

Custom WordPress Theme, Custom Write Panels and Coding Using Conditional Statements

I recently had the pleasure of converting 3 existing websites to WordPress. All either used a different content management system or platform.

Visit Eat at Cane Bay

Eat at Cane Bay is located on the north shore of St. Croix in the US Virgin Islands.

Visit Villa Marco Polo

The Villa Marco Polo is a drop-dead gorgeous Bed and Breakfast located in Victoria, British Columbia.

Visit RMD Architect

RMD Architect is an architectural firm located in the US Virgin Islands.

The following are several website designs that were done either under subcontract and were not the selected design concept, or they are currently under review by the client.

I work with WordPress almost exclusively, and there isn’t any website design that cannot be implemented.  There are some designers or developers that think if you use WordPress you are limited in design.  That is so not true!

If you need a new website design (redesign) or have a design you already love contact me to learn how I can help you.

[Show as slideshow]

There are some non-professionals that can do a good job doing their own website.

The following website owners seriously need to hire a professional.

Yvette’s: If I were living in the Panama City area and was searching for a bridal shop to find the dress of my dreams…well after seeing the site I’d certainly cross them off my list of shops to visit. Be forewarned…there’s music.

Havenworks: This site needs a major overhaul just to organize the information.

George Hutchins: Seriously who would vote for him? He could beat anyone just by having them visit his site as they would have a terrible seizure and die.

If you’d like to see a lot more ugly websites visit Web Pages That Suck

Let’s just say I’ve seen more than enough ugly real estate websites. On the other hand I’ve seen quite a few really great ones.

Real estate websites should be about the real estate which is buying and selling. The agent should leave their ego out as the the website should not be all about the agent. Okay, you are some what important and should show the potential client what you can do for them, but never forget that it is about the property.

I highly recommend having great photographs of the house, condo, villa, vacant land, or commercial property When someone is going to be moving to a new area the first thing they’ll do is go on the internet and start searching, and looking at various listings. The ones that will catch their eye (besides a great price) is the photography of the property. There’s nothing worse than gray and dingy looking photos.

It’s certainly not required but I would recommend providing information about schools, shopping, activities and other useful information such as police, fire, and hospitals.

Lastly there are some great tools out there to manage your website and listings. So let’s get started!

I finally finished! There is still some work to do, but so far I’m very happy with it.

What are your thoughts?

Well it has been at least 3 years since I did a redesign, and one is under way. Maybe two. One has a lot of color and almost finished, or maybe just do a few wholesale changes to this one. I do love the clean look.

One thing I am definitely adding is threaded comments.

In a nutshell. No.

A former employer advised a client that the first email is secure it’s the subsequent emails such as replying isn’t. That is so not true email is NEVER SECURE. The client had a reservations form using a SSL to collect credit card information, but then that information was inserted into an email that went to the business. There are methods to securely collect credit card information for later manual processing.

Credit card or other sensitive information should never be sent using email. Absolutely not!

Okay, there are companies that offer secure email, but I still would never recommend using it for credit card or other sensitive information.

A couple of months ago I read the following article over at Smashing Magazine which I had to agree with wholeheartedly. At a company where I previously worked design was expected to be pulled out of my ass with no time to think about it (and given crappy photos to work with), or I was sent links to templates over at Template Monster.

I will say there are at least two websites that I did that I absolutely hate!! And still hate! Shudder!!!!

It takes time and careful thought for good to great web design and development. We all notice the notice the design, but are completely unaware of the development aspect. The development should always take into consideration:

• the where do I want to go or be in the future with this site
• have you thought about this
• the “no” to that is so not a good idea and this is why

There are potential clients that do not seem to understand the amount of work that goes into preparing a proposal and it’s even harder when they don’t respond to specific question, and then creating the design.

I want you to have a great website that can grow as your business grows without growing pains. I don’t want you to have to switch platforms, applications, etc.

Examples of growing pains would be:

Creating a website on a Linux server using a PHP/MySQL application, and in the future you want to add a feature that requires Windows (ASP.NET/SQL Server) to run and under the same domain name.

Building a static site (HTML/XHTML) and you decide you want interactivity so now the site has to be redone in either PHP/MySQL or ASP.NET/SQL Server. JavaScript is nice and so is AJAX (ohh, I just love what AJAX can do), but if JavaScript is turned off in a visitor’s browser they aren’t going to see the feature that was added.

I could so go on and on about this topic.