If your real estate website is powered by WordPress, chances are you have been looking for a good way to implement contact froms on your website. There are number of plugins that can help you with this task. However one particular plugin deserves special attention- Formbuilder Plugin for WordPress.

Unlike other plugins, the Formbuilder gives you the freedom to create contact forms where you can customize every field to your liking, while giving you complete control over the number and the types of the fields you want to use in a contact form. With Formbuilder you can also create number of different contact form that would serve completely different purpose. For example you can have one form designed to capture buyers, another one to capture sellers yet another one to capture renters. Which can be very useful in creating separate landing pages for each of the above mentioned groups.
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Twitter users may find Twitter Tools very useful. It eliminates the need of services like TwitterFeed, and offers array of other feature that will help you to synchronize your Twitter activity with your blog(s).

Once installed you can configure the plugin to do following:

1. Create a tweet when you publish a new post. For me this eliminated the need for TwitterFeed, and is probably the only option I will use for now.
2. Create a blog post from each of your tweets.
3. Create a daily digest blog post from your tweets
4. Create a weekly digest blog post from your tweets

In addition it has a widget you can use on the sidebar of your blog which you can use to create new tweets.

If everything goes well and I have configured this plugin properly, it should notify Twitter about this post. If you are using Twitter Tools already, let me know what is your impression about this plugin in the comments below.

About over a week ago Go Beyond MLS was down for several days. In fact my entire hosting account was suspended. Evidently my websites were overloading the server and exhausting the server resources.

As attractive as shared hosting is, keeping low prices and all, every serious web master and/or blogger needs to look ahead and plan for a dedicated server solutions… eventually.

As much as I love WordPress as blogging platform, it uses good amount of server resources to evidently cause serious enough trouble for my web host to have my account suspended. So I had to do something. Optimize my sites so that they would not over load the server or move to dedicated web hosting solution (which would cost me about $1200 a year even with the least expensive solutions out there). So I opted for optimizing my websites (at least those powered by WordPress) with WP Super Cache plugin.

WP Super Cache along with it’s parental plugin WP Cache, where aimed primarily at allowing WordPress blogs to survive heavy loads of traffic resulting from websites like Digg or Slashdot. However, as it was in my case, you don’t have to hit the front page of Digg or Slashdot to cause some server issues.

So how does WP Super Cache do it? After you install and configure the plugin, it saves individual pages from your WordPress site and serves them to your visitors as plain old html as long as they do not leave comments. Statistically over 90% of your visitors are passing by without ever leaving a comment. Therefor it is save to presume that over 90% of your visitors will be shown the cached hml versions of your pages instead of heavy PHP scripts.

I know that down the road I will have to revisit the possibility of purchasing dedicated server. But if WP Super Cache can buy me a year, it will end up saving me about $1,200.00.

Side note: If you do not have your custom (“pretty”) permalinks configured on your blog, you will have to configure them- WP Super Cache requires that configuration. It is also good idea to backup your current .htaccess file before configuring WP Super Cache Plugin should things go wrong.

If you are a blogger, chances are that sooner or later you will come across a phenomena called “splogs”. These blogs republish your content without your permission and without giving your a proper credit for your work. Some times they do link back to you but dressing up your links in pink colors of “nofollow” attribute. So how do you deal with them?

I came across an interesting discussion on AgentGenius.com on how to deal with splogs. Tom Royce of Real Estate Bloggers suggested a plugin called RSS footer- this plugin allows you to ad an extra link into your feed with a custom message, which can be used to expose and embarrass the splogger.

There is also another similar solution to the above plugin. I have been using it for quiet sometime without realizing it has a potential to insert additional links each of your RSS feed item- Similar Posts Plugin. This plugin undergone husge transformation since I first began using it, if you have it on your blog an kept with plugin’s updates make sure to look at every set of settings to appreciate more what this plugin can do for your blog. You can specify the links to similar post in RSS feed under “Placement” option in the latests version of the plugin.

Since many of the splogs are automated, the extra links to your website will begin to show up on these splogs. There is one more benefit from using the above described plugin- but revealing it means giving away a simple solution to the “developers” of these splogs.

So to all of you who think splogs are fun I am begging you: please go ahead and scrape my blogs.

Note: Above plugins are for WordPress.org powered websites only.

If you have 30 minutes of free time, you can probably benefit by watching the video below from the WordCamp 2008. The presentation below is made by Stephan Spencer the founder and president of Netconcepts and the author of SEO Title Tag Plugin for WordPress, which I might add should be #1 plugin on your list to install if you are just starting to use WordPress.

(HT: ProBlogger)

UPDATE: To benefit from the above presentation download the PowerPoint Presentation that Stephan mentioned at the start of his presentation.