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.

TourVista’s interactive floor plans are a great addition to your virtual tour.  If you already have floor plan graphics, you are ready to connect them to your photos and create interactive floor plans.

But how do you create the floor plan graphic in the first place?

You may be able to get floor plan graphics from an assessor or your home blueprints (if you can find them). Or you could just do it the old fashioned way: with a pencil and some graph paper!

Drawing a sketch of your floor plans and converting that sketch into a floor plan graphic is a fast and easy way to create your floor plans.  Here’s a tutorial on how to convert your sketches into floor plan graphics using Photoshop.

The video above follows these steps for creating a floor plan graphic from your hand-drawn sketches using Photoshop:

1. take a picture of the sketch from straight above
2. open picture in Photoshop and crop it; leave a small padding for the borders and dimensions should be at least 500px. if long and narrow, consider rotating it 90 degrees
3. add guides for each wall
4. draw exterior & interior walls on their own layers. hold “shift” key and click away
5. add room name labels
6. export for web as .gif
7. save .psd for future reference
8. upload floor plan graphic to your virtual tour on www.TourVista.com

Walls

• color: #777777 (gray)
• pencil width: 5px for exterior; 3px for interior

Room Labels

• Myriad Pro – Bold Condensed
• color: #000000 (black)
• Size: 18-36pt

Note: when uploaded to TourVista the floor plan will be shrunk to around 350px wide.

Leverage the power of Facebook, Twitter and over 50 other social networks to help spread the word about your virtual tours. It is super easy to do and a great way to share & promote your real estate listings using the web’s hottest new technologies.

Instructions: Post your virtual tour on Facebook

1. open your dedicated property website in any web browser (e.g. www.tourvista.com/784)
2. click on the Share tab
3. mouseover the “Social networks and bookmarking sites” button and click on Facebook

Facebook will open in a new window and pre-populate a Profile post for your Wall that includes:

• a link to your virtual tour website
• the property address, type and description
• a thumbnail image – select a different image using the little arrow buttons

Add a personal note at the top if you’d like and click the Share button to update your Wall and your friend’s News Feeds.

Note: you have the option of “Send a Message” that will email your TourVista link to select friends directly from Facebook. We recommend using the Wall method described above because it allows visibility to all of your friends (present and future) and will generate more traffic for you.  In this sense, the Wall post is less invasive on your friends and more permanent for your online marketing.

ps – speaking of Facebook, if you haven’t claimed your personal Facebook URL yet (e.g. www.facebook.com/mattcass) do it now – www.facebook.com/username. You can get one for your company page on Facebook but only if you have 25 fans. Of course, we’d love to have you become a fan of TourVista’s Facebook page!

update 12/21/09: link to your Facebook and Twitter accounts directly from your virtual tours!

TourVista creates a dedicated property website and link for each of your virtual tours. For example, www.tourvista.com/784. Link to this dedicated property website in your marketing materials to maximize your property views and increase your online brand.

Property sellers: be sure to include your TourVista link in your local MLS and get maximum exposure for your property. Most MLS’s will include this link in their data feed, meaning that your virtual tour link will show on many major real estate search portals.

Some MLS’s restrict the information that you can show online about your properties. TourVista allows you to customize which information is shown ensuring that you are in compliance with your MLS.

This short video gives a demonstration on how to create a non-branded, MLS-compliant link to your virtual tour website:

UPDATE: 06/29/2010 – we’ve improved the availability options.  See this new blog post and short tutorial video.

A subtle but important addition is now showing on the Property Details page for your virtual tours, the availability date field:

Use this field to indicate if your property is not available until a certain calendar date.  This is especially useful for rental properties that are currently occupied and becoming available in the near future.

If you have included an availability date for a virtual tour, your dedicated property website on TourVista and your widgets will automatically update to show the available date:

If you are using TourVista’s Community Website Templates, the availability for each of your properties is shown. Either the date will show, or “Available NOW” if you have left the availability date field empty. Here’s an example from a website currently powered by TourVista, www.UWStudentHouses.com:

Our free Craigslist templates have been improved to save you even more time. In addition to the main description HTML code that you can copy and paste into your Craigslist post, your property title, price and address are also shown. Just click to highlight them, copy and paste into Craigslist.

There is also a link to your virtual tour photos on TourVista. While our Craigslist templates include your first 7 photos, it’s also a good idea to upload at least one other photo using the “Add Images” form that Craigslist provides. This photo will show at the bottom of your post. We recommend using a photo that is not already included in the template code TourVista provides.

We are working on some new Craigslist templates and look forward to offering these in the near future!

(Update: 08-16-09) – Video tutorial for posting your virtual tour onto Craigslist in only 3 minutes.

Some of TourVista’s users were uploading really large photos (3000 x 2500 pixels) for their virtual tours and these photos were too large for TourVista.com to process, resize and display.  We’ve fixed this issue and the website now accepts very large photos.  Yay!

Photography tip: if your photos are meant just for the Internet, there’s no need to make them so large. Really large photos are bad because they:

1. use up your camera’s memory card quicker
2. take longer to transfer from your camera to your computer
3. take up more space on your computer
4. take longer to upload to TourVista.com

If your photos are meant for print (fliers, magazines, etc.) then you should take them at a large size (a.k.a. large resolution).  But if just for the web, 1600 x 1200 pixels is plenty large.  TourVista will resize your photos to 800 x 600 pixels anyways.  This is the largest photo size the website currently allows, as shown on the virtual tour slideshow.

Now when you upload a video to your virtual tour, a “Processing…” message shows until your video has been transcoded and is ready to be displayed. Unlike some sites that make you wait an hour (or more!) for your video to show, TourVista displays your video in just a few minutes.

I saw a keynote by Sonny Kobe Cook (the founder of Sleep Country USA) in 2007 and of the many great ideas she shared, one in particular stands out to this day. Actually, it was a quote on a plaque that she saw in a restaurant years ago:

It’s impossible to be 1,000% better than every other restaurant. Let’s try to be 1% better in 1,000 little ways.

This is good stuff.  And is the inspiration for this new category in TourVista’s Blog: 1,000 Little Things.  While we are constantly working on large improvements to the TourVista website and user experience, it’s rare that a week goes by without a few small tweaks and adjustments as well.  These minor adjustments might not be noticed by most of our users, but they are little nudges forward, continuing to push TourVista and our user experience in the best direction possible.

We already have a category devoted to TourVista’s major improvements, but I thought it would be useful to show you the small improvements we are making as well.

Please let us know what you think and if you have ideas for improvements to TourVista (small or large) we’d love to hear ‘em.