Now you can easily link your TourVista virtual tours to another website.  When editing your tour, in the description, highlight the text and add the link.  You can choose to link in a new window or the same window. The following screencast shows you how:

Your property virtual tours look great on Apple’s new iPad.

However, at first, it appears that you can’t scroll the thumbnail photos on the iPad.

Use 2 fingers to scroll the thumbnail box on your iPad

iPad doesn’t support inline scrolling.  Inline means a scroll box within the web page.  The thumbnail photo box is an inline scroll box.  So is the property description (if you have a lot of text in there).

Turns out the solution is simple. To scroll an inline scroll box, use two fingers and swipe up or down.  That’s how you scroll an inline scroll box.

Thanks to Jodi of Minnesota for requesting that we add rich text editor to the tour description field.

Rich text editor to quickly format your tour description

Access the rich text editor by (1) selecting your virtual tour and (2) selecting Property Details.  You’ll see the description box at the bottom of the Property Details page.  Just point, click and edit away!

Thanks to Keisha for suggesting that we add a parking option for “carport”.

Carport option added to Virtual Tour Details

Carport option showing on Virtual Tour Web Page

Carport option showing on Virtual Tour Widget

Let us know if you have ideas for improving TourVista!

TourVista has customers all around the world and our newest update is to change the currency for your tour’s pricing so it is appropriate for your country.

Update 08/09/10: we just added support for Pound Sterling (£) and Yen (¥).

Follow these steps to update your virtual tour’s pricing currency:

1. Sign in to your TourVista account
2. Select the virtual tour from My Virtual Tours
3. Notice the new option for changing currencies next to pricing. Select the appropriate currency.
4. If your currency is not listed, contact us to request that we add your currency.
5. Save your virtual tour

The currency will be updated on your dedicated page and also your virtual tour widgets.

Thanks for the suggestion Gabe! We listen to (good) suggestions from our users.  If you have an idea on how TourVista can be improved, let us know!

Tutorial on how to set the availability date for your property virtual tours on TourVista.com and also on your Community Website if you have one. Choose from 3 options:

1. Now - if your property is currently available.
2. Please Call – if unsure of availability. On your Community Website, this message will show: “Limited availability. Please call to be added to our waitlist.“
3. Not Until Date… – if this property is not available until a certain date in the future, select  and enter that date.

It’s easy to link your virtual tours on TourVista to your Facebook and Twitter pages.  Just copy/paste the URL (web page address) for your Facebook and Twitter pages into the form on My Account when logged into TourVista.

Connect your virtual tours to your accounts on Facebook and Twitter

By doing so, your viewers will be able to connect with you in new ways.  Thanks to our friends at www.zaran.com for suggesting this latest improvement to TourVista.

Recently a TourVista member requested that his email address be shown with the other contact information on his virtual tours.  This would allow his potential customers to email him directly with one click.  That makes good sense.

We take our member’s suggestions to heart and are pleased to announce the release of this new functionality for TourVista.  Now you have the option to display your email address as a link on your virtual tours.  The email address shown will be the same email you use to login to your TourVista account.

It’s easy to turn this on/off for each of your virtual tours.  Just select “Yes” from the “Show My Email” option when managing the Property Details for your virtual tours, like this:

field for toggling if your email address shows publicly

And here’s how your email address will be shown on your virtual tour:

showing your email address on a virtual tour

Of course, your potential customers can simply complete the More Information form that shows on all of your virtual tours, which will email you directly while keeping your email address private.

Take note: by publishing your email address, you are increasing the chances that automated spam-sending programs may obtain your email address and send unsolicited emails.

An annoying website bug was squashed today: the ability to drag and drop property photos in Internet Explorer web browser.

This is a great (and fun!) feature of TourVista.  No need to mess with annoying up/down arrows to put your photos in the perfect order.  Just click on a photo with your mouse, drag it to the proper order relative to the other photos, and drop it into place!  Piece of cake.  The other photos will automatically rearrange themselves, too.

Watch a video demo of sorting photos via drag and drop (jump to 1:15 in the video).

It was recently brought to our attention that the custom virtual tour links was not working for Internet Explorer (IE) web browsers. Ah yes, IE, the nemesis of all web developers. We’ve fixed this. Sorry for the hassle for any of you IE users that experienced this bug when building MLS-compliant links for your virtual tours.

In case you are wondering how to use this nifty feature, watch this 1 minute video tutorial on creating a non-branded / MLS-compliant link for your virtual tour.