This web site was built to demonstrate how the open-source CMS software WordPress can be better used as an effective tool for realtors or real estate companies to market their listings on the Internet. As such, this web site is designed for two readerships, the real estate professional that is looking for a better website tool suite and the WordPress designer/developer that is interested in the techniques employed in WP-RealEstate.

“Your Real Estate Page” represents a DEFAULT layout (theme) – your own page can be either more or less like what you see here – there are hundreds of themes available. Much more can be done in terms of imagery, formatting, layout and information delivery – it’s a matter of personal taste and marketing differentiation – how much you want to stand out from the crowd.

The WordPress “engine” is already used for many real estate web sites with varying degrees of success, the more successful sites usually achieve this with some tweaking of the original, mainstream WordPress code-base. This is done either by the creation of plug-ins for delivering realtor or property information, or by direct manipulation of the WordPress code-base.

WP-RealEstate is also a manipulation or “fork” of the WordPress code-base, it employs a coding technique by which the end user can apply special formatting or layout to posts using POST_TEMPLATES (see “A Technical Perspective” page). It also uses key WordPress plug-ins that provide excellent administration/authoring tools and page output that better serves the marketing needs of real estate professionals.

It should be noted that the coding technique employed in WP-RealEsate is not limited to the usage in real estate sites, it can be applied to many other genres such as e-Commerce sites, for example. But, I’ll leave you to boldly go down that path – the focus here is on real estate.