How2 Set Up Your Personal Webpage

 

Randcenter has a comprehensive set of functions for helping agents set up personal profiles and their own personal web page.

Here’s how to set it up.  First, go to the RandCenter home page and look for the link on the top menu bar for “My Virtual Office.”  Click on that menu item, and pull down the choice for “Web 2.0 Builder.”  You’ll now be in the Web 2.0 Builder home page, and you’ll see that there’s a set of menu items entitled “Your Agent Site & Profile.”  click on the “Manage & Edit Agent Website” link.

If you click on that link, you’ll go to the Agent website homepage. This allows you to create a customized homepage that has all the functionality of the Randrealty.com site but is branded for you.

Step 1: Select Your Page Design Elements

In the Page Design section, you’ll be able to choose the small banner along the top from among a series of photo scheme choices.  It’s very tough to tell what style you’ll like without trial-and-error.  Try out of a few variations, save the site, and then go back to the Web 2.0 Builder home page and “View Agent Website” to see how it came out.

Step 2: Enter your basic Agent Information

Some of this information might be filled out for you.  If not, fill it out with your first and last name.  Your  “Website URL” is the address people can enter to reach your webpage.  It defaults as follows: “josephrand.randrealty.com”.  That’s how you should leave it, unless you would like to customize it in some way.  Be careful, though, that you don’t use a term that might be seen to be frivolous, since this is your official page on the randrealty.com site.

You can also enter a “Purchased URL” if you own a URL (like josephrand.com) and would like to point it to your personal homepage on randrealty.com.  If you enter the purchased URL here, we will connect the personal homepage to that URL.

You can also click the boxes if you would like the home page to display your active and sold listings, which you probably want to do.

 Step 3:  Select your Designations

If you have received professional designations, you can click off the appropriate designations so that they show up on your home page.

 Step 4: Select Social Networks

If you have presence on the main social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, ActiveRain, and Youtube) with a home page on those sites, you can input the URL to get to those sites. If you don’t know the URL, you should go to the sites to see if you can find the URL that directs people specifically to your home page on the sites.

 Step 5: Setup Widgets

You have the ability to customize your personal homepage with a series of “widgets,” small sections of programming code that provide some flavor and functionality to your website.  Some of the widgets will go to the side of your website, the others to the bottom.  We provide you with a couple of fundamental widgets, including: Mortgage Calculator, Mortgage Rates, School Report, and local weather.

Additional widgets can be obtained from the following popular sites: HousingWidgets.com, ActiveRain.com, LinkedIn.com, Trulia.com, Plugoo.com, YouTube.com.  If you put in a widget and don’t like it, just take it out.

Like a lot of what’s in Web Builder 2.0, you can do a lot with trial-and-error – adding widgets to see how they work, then moving them from one place to another or taking them out altogether.

Step 6: Setup Navigation for Your Site

The Menu Navigation section provides you with an array of choices for customizing your personal homepage. One of those links will be the “About Me” page that is your personal profile, and the other will be a links section.  You can also put up to the two other links that go on the top of your personal website, from among the following choices: Testimonials, Featured Listings, Custom, My Blog, Company Blog, Open Houses, New Developments, Home Valuator.  These choices are fairly self-explanatory.

The “Custom” link is simply an opportunity for you to write out a text block. For example, if you want to put out a page about your marketing approach to a listing, or something else specific to you and your business, you can put it in there.

Once you’ve set up your Menu Navigation, you’ll need to fill in your About Me page and your links page. For the links, you’ll have to manually type in the links and the names for those links.  For the About Me page, you’ll need to write out a personal profile.

Step 7: Setup About Me

This is where you can input your professional profile.  Just cut and paste your professional profile into the text box space.  For more on how to write your page, go to “How to Write Your About Me” Page in the How To Guide.

 Step 8: Setup Links

Finally, you can set up a links page for your home page, which can be anything from a list of municipal links to local restaurants to really anything that you’d like to connect to. You have the option of setting up several categories of links.  To set up your links, just follow these steps:

• First, name the category of the links (i.e., “Local Towns,” “Great Restaurants,”  “Local School Districts”).
• Second, name the link by its common name.
• Third, give the URL for the link, including the http://www section.