Frank Schulte-Ladbeck

A theme for real estate professionals who want to blog.

When you work in real estate, and you are on the net for work, you find yourself encountering the same people in different places. Rich Danserau, over at Postive Real Estate Professionals, told me that I should check out the work of a lady named Rebecca Levinson. Since I trust Rich’s advice, I headed over to her ActiveRain blog. Needless to say, I was impressed. When we connected on Facebook, I did pay more attention to a program that she had developed to assist other real estate professionals become top bloggers called Blogging Tune Up. She works with only one real estate professional in a market with their blogging skills to help them succeed. She has many happy clients.
    I told Rebecca that I would love to create a WordPress theme for her to give away to her clients, so she gave me a few specifications, and the Real Skillz theme was born. The theme is in blue tones. The header comes first with the blog title and slogan centered to make the first impact for your brand. After the header you have a menu bar. The categories are left in the sidebar of this theme. If you choose your categories and sub-categories carefully, you can make a greater impact by having them displayed here. Rebecca had suggested having an about me section in the sidebar (a place to write about yourself to help build your brand). Add the “About Me” widget to your sidebar, and I would have this as your first sidebar item.
    The theme has two columns: one area for the posts; and one for the sidebar. This allows your blog posts to command more attention. Since real estate professionals rely on many visuals to help their clients, the theme was designed with the idea of making images pop. The blue background helps images of the home stand out. There is also a black border around the images to help emphasize them. Most photographer sites use black backgrounds to help make the images stand out, but Rebecca’s choice of blue is clever. You can still write content that will be a focus and have the images noticed. To help make content important, a “related posts” feature is built into the theme (no plugin needed). To have the sidebar content be noticed, a lighter blue was used for the backgrounds there. Currently, the search feature is the top element in the sidebar. The next element is quite nice to encourage site exploration: a tag cloud. The post headers emphasize the title, while the post footers have the post meta data in a light blue bar. This is where your tags will be displayed.
    Lastly, most of my themes, I leave the RSS button down in the footer, so you can place the RSS where you would like. In this theme, the RSS button is located below the post title, where the other meta data like the name of the author is located. As with all of my themes geared towards businesses, I have a reminder to include a Terms of Service and a Privacy pages. If you do not need them, you can remove them.
    If you need help having your blogging career start off on the right foot, then you should head over to Ms. Levinson’s site. She may be able to help you.  Download the Real Skillz theme.