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A specific beef: Off-site “virtual resources” should open in their own browser windows
By: Greg Swann,
BloodhoundBlog.com
Posted: Wednesday, August 20th, 2008, 12:00 pm MST
Category: Conversion
Since we are no longer permitted to point buyers to our single-property web sites in the Remarks section of the listing, we have been building “unbranded” versions of the sites to link to as virtual resources in ARMLS.
This is not as time-consuming as it could be, but, of course, we are obliged to keep secrets we would rather didn’t keep. But the unbranded sites at least worked under Tempo.
Not so in flexMLS. FBS is attempting to “frame” offsite resources, which imposes FBS-server-based software limitations on the linked pages. In the case of our unbranded single-property web sites, the CSS of the pages is being clobbered. They end up looking like hell.
Framing any URL-referenced resource makes no sense to me, since the user is giving up screen real estate for content that could just as easily be opened into a new browser tab.
This would be my preference, to have all off-site “virtual resources” open into their own browser tab. Even where it is not failing, framing these web pages is needlessly constraining.
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing, technology
August 20th, 2008 at 3:15 pm
We’re considering adding an option to allow the listing agents to specify that a link be opened in a new window. We originally didn’t do that because pop-up blockers are one of the top support calls and we were trying to reduce that problem, but, in the case of virtual tours and other web sites like the single property web sits you mention, our approach causes more problems than it solves. We’ll find a fix.
November 14th, 2008 at 11:32 am
As you’re probably already aware, this feature was added recently to flexmls Web and is available as a setting on each listing. This will help with virtual tours that are too small to be framed or don’t work well inside of a frame.