OK, perhaps a slight exaggeration in the title to this post, but it’s not unusual for a Microsoft product to have bugs. Their newest release of the-growing-ever-unpopular web browser Internet Explorer 9 was breaking TourVista’s coolest technology: the ability to drag and drop your tour content. Thanks to a few of our users who contacted us to report this issue.
We’re glad to report that we’ve made the necessary updates so that TourVista is fully compatible with Internet Explorer 9 (aka IE9). You can go back to dragging and dropping your photos and arrows onto the interactive floor plans you create with TourVista. 🙂
PS. thanks to IE9 as it provides great job security for website developers!
Every day you make a tiny bit if progress. You make one thing just a smidgen better. A tiny improvement that will barely benefit anyone. One inch.
There are thousands of these tiny things.
It takes a mindset of constant criticism to find them. And as you fix more and more of these little details, as you polish and shape and shine and craft the little corners of your product, something magical happens.
The inches add up to feet, the feet add up to yards, and the yards add up to miles. And you have a truly great product. The kind of product that feels great, that works intuitively, that blows people away. The kind of product where that one-in-a-million user doing that one-in-a-million unusual thing finds that not only does it work, but it’s beautiful: even the janitor’s closets of your software have marble floors and solid-core oak doors and polished mahogany wainscoting.
The onset of November is a simple, yet stern, reminder to us all of what’s to come. No matter what your state or climate, it’s important to prepare your home for the coming winter months. MSN Real Estate has compiled a list of the top 10 ways to winterize your home. Every one of these steps is a quick and easy DIY project that could save you THOU$AND$ in home repair. There’s also a professional services locator and other helpful hints. Don’t let mother nature catch you off guard. Take these simple steps now and prepare your home for the winter.
If you have a video of your listing, be sure to include it on your TourVista virtual tour. Here’s how:
Upgrade your virtual tour to Premium
Upload your video to your YouTube account
Copy the video ID from YouTube
Paste the video ID into the Video section of your virtual tour
Now a Video tab will show on your virtual tour page & widgets that includes your video from YouTube.
Plus, thanks to the suggestion from Phyllis R., the “Related Videos” from YouTube are no longer showing when your video finished playing on your virtual tour. Not only is this a better experience for your viewers (no need to show them content that is not specifically about your property) but if your property is in an MLS you don’t have to worry about getting any fines. Some MLS’s are very strict about what you can and cannot show about a property online.
Google Maps is great and most of the time it works as expected. But every once in a while, for whatever reason, it won’t map your property correctly. This is annoying and ruins all of the effort you’ve put into creating your virtual tour on TourVista.
Previously, you had to contact us and we would manually update your mapping. As you know, TourVista is all about do-it-yourself solutions, so we’ve made some improvements to our tour management interface and now you can easily modify the mapping of your property as it shows on Google Maps!
Here’s a video tutorial from our founder Matt Cassarino explaining the deets:
We’ve given our real estate marketing blog some much needed love by adding a few cool social media improvements:
Notice on the left the super cool social media share box. This makes it a breeze to share a great blog post with your social network. And check out what happens when you scroll the page down… how cool is that! Thanks Sharebar for the great WordPress plugin.
Next we added a list of Related Posts at the bottom of each post. A great way to showcase useful and related content on our blog.
In the Comments section there is checkbox for staying in the loop as comments are posted to a conversation — cool.
And last but not least, at the bottom of each blog post we’ve included links to the next and previous posts for easy browsing.
Now, admittedly, none of the above is that impressive (well, the sharebar one is pretty slick), but the point is (a) that we are continually working to improve our website and blog, and (b) that there are some social media improvements in the works for your virtual tours at TourVista.com.
We’ve heard from some of our users that people may not know to mouseover the interactive floor plans in order to view the arrows and each respective photograph. Leaving out this instructive text was a deliberate design decision as we wanted to keep the tour player free of unnecessary content. However, at the same time, if a user doesn’t realize that their is an interactive floor plan and never experiences that aspect of the virtual tour, that’s an even greater loss.
So we’ve updated the TourVista source code to give the best of both worlds. Now you can choose whether or not to show a message informing the users that they should mouseover the interactive floor plan in order to use it. And you can even customize the message text for each of your virtual tours with interactive floor plans!
Thanks to Eric from Chicago for this suggestion. Check out his virtual tour in Chicago’s Garfield Ridge. As always, let us know what you think and if you have any ideas for improving TourVista, we’re listening.
In case you ever need to transfer a virtual tour between accounts, don’t waste your time in recreating it! Just follow the steps outlined in this tutorial and quickly move a virtual tour from one TourVista account to another.
Note: if you are transferring a Premium virtual tour to a Free account or an account that has already used up all of its Premium virtual tours, the transferred Premium tour will be automatically downgraded to Free. However, don’t worry about losing any of the data from the tour. The receiving account can simply upgrade to a larger Premium plan and then upgrade the transferred virtual tour back to its Premium status.
Today we launched an update to TourVista’s real estate marketing platform that allows our Premium users to include a YouTube video on their virtual tours. This is a fantastic enhancement and we encourage everyone to take advantage of using video for marketing their properties online.
What if I don’t have a video of each property?
No problem! Instead of a property video, many real estate agents include a short personal video. Doing so allows them to add additional personalization to their virtual tours and helps to generate new customers.
Do I have to upload my video to YouTube first? Yes, you do not upload your property/personal video to TourVista. Instead, upload your video to your YouTube account, then copy/paste the YouTube video ID on to the Video page of your virtual tour, as the above video tutorial demonstrates. If you don’t have a YouTube account, set one up — they are free and it only takes a few minutes.
Does it benefit my and/or my property to post the video on YouTube?
Yes! Absolutely! YouTube is one of the most trafficked websites on the Internet. Many people use the search tool on YouTube to find videos to watch. While at this time, YouTube is not what we would consider a “real estate search portal”, it doesn’t hurt to have extra exposure for your properties and your business online.
Plus, YouTube has a world-class hosting platform and converts your videos so they can be seen on mobile browsers, too. Add to that “video streaming” (which means you can jump to a section of the video that hasn’t downloaded yet) and there’s really no reason to not publish your videos to YouTube.
Remember, the Internet is a tool that you can use to better market your properties and your business. TourVista helps you do both!
We are happy to announce support for Google Analytics on TourVista’s real estate marketing platform. In addition to the built-in statistics that TourVista provides all user accounts, it is now possible to track your virtual tour statistics using Google Analytics. Here’s how:
Copy your Google Analytics tracking code. It will be in this format: UA-12345678-1
Login to your TourVista account and select the tour you want to track stats.
Select “Analytics (Stats)” from the “This Tour” drop down menu.
Paste your Google Analytics tracking code from step 1 into the field.
To quickly apply the same Google Analytics tracking code to ALL virtual tours in your account, just mark the checkbox.
Save.
Any tour views you get from this point on will be tracked in your Google Analytics account (although it will take a few hours for the stats to start showing in Analytics).
Hey All,