The solution at the time was to whip up a website at australianrealestatesoftware.com to prove the concept and test if agents would use it.

The test proved both successful and unsuccessful at the same time. For a minimal effort it got quite a reasonable level of traffic for specific targeted audience.

Unfortunately because I did not want to invest too much into the first version of the site in case agents wouldn’t use such a directory I chose to only create a very basic site. This lead to people finding what they wanted through the search engines but not really browsing the directory for other solutions available.

The other week I decided to give the old girl a bit of a tart up and moved everything over to a wordpress installation. The wordpress CMS allows me to quickly and easily provide advanced functionality. So now the site not only displays a funky new look but visitors can now leave comments and easily rate particular solutions as well. At the bottom of every entry is a list of other software or solutions in the directory that might also suit.

Visitors can now even subscribe to updates either through RSS, email or twitter.

The change has already proved to be highly successful and the average number of pages viewed per visitor is now 5 times more than the previous design.  If you are an agent and you know something that should be in the directory and isn’t, let me know by submitting the details.