We’re excited to be releasing a new version of our listing page this Wednesday 8/14 at 12am EDT (Tuesday night at midnight Eastern). This new version has an updated design and user experience, and is the first iteration of an ongoing project to refine and improve our listing page experience, for consumers and our customers. There are some key improvements in this release:

• Overall Look & Feel: We simplified the design and now have more that consumers want and expect to see. We’ve reduced the number of items, especially unfamiliar at first sight items above the fold of the page.
  
  
• SEO: We’ve added a number of SEO upgrades to the listing page. In addition to performance improvements, we’ve added the additional photos which all have ALT tags, we’ve added schema.org structured data tags around key pieces of information. This markup code helps Google determine which information is the most relevant and important on your page and can potentially be used in rich snippets in search results, if the website as a whole has enough authority (and a lot of other factors).
  
  
• Photos: We’ve made the main photo much larger and simplified the navigation through the gallery. The gallery also loads much faster. In addition to the main photo we now preview the listing photos in our QuickView column on the left side. The user can click through these photos very quick and see multiples at a time. This is a concept we’re going to keep on developing, there’s a few other ways we can see photo previews being valuable to the consumer to quickly decide if a listing is relevant to their preferences/needs.
  
  
• Call To Actions: A central part of this new release was to rethink our Call-To-Actions which are all the buttons and links a consumer can push to either ask for help, and/or create a lead. We wanted to add more of them but do it in a way that made sense and not be overwhelming to the user. We are now providing more and clearer opportunities for users to reach out and create leads than we ever have and not just at the top of the page. The Calls-To-Actions are repeated a few times throughout the page as you with one right at the bottom of the listing information. We’re confident that this simple new design and usability will increase lead conversion.
  
  
• Friends and Family: We’ve also simplified our “Social Search” section and renamed it Friends and Family. The name Social Search didn’t really give people a good idea of what it does. We’ve also taken out the share to social networks button from that section too and put it with our main call-to-actions, as having it there added confusion. So it’s now simplified and indicative of the value it can provide. We’re looking to add more to the Friends and Family functionality in upcoming releases to make it even more valuable.
  
  
• Bathrooms: One of the things we’ve heard a lot about is the consistency of bathroom data. Different MLSs have the bathroom data in different formats, and have different classifications for the same type of bathroom. So we have now carried over the Total Bathrooms number for each listing into the listing summary area at the top of the page, and then in the Listing Snapshot we break that down into the number of full baths and partial baths. We now have the ability to break that down even further into ½ Baths and ¾ Baths, and will be able to update the data mappings for each MLS where this could improve clarity. That data work is outside of the scope of this project.
  
  
• Additional CSS Classes: We have added another layer of CSS specificity to the new page which should allow more advanced users to customize more specific classes and page elements. 

Launch Preparation & Review

We will be putting this page into production on Wednesday, August 14 at 12am EDT (Tuesday evening at midnight Eastern). Please check your sites to ensure that the javascript and css files are purged from your server caches. If things are looking off, reset your server and WordPress caches and it should resolve the issue immediately.

If you have applied any custom CSS to the existing listing page design, on the new version, please check that there are no styling issues. We have tried to keep the CSS namespace as consistent as possible, but we have moved some things around on the page, so this may have some impact if you’ve heavily customized the design. 

Questions & Support

If you have any questions, please reach out to our support team at help@showcaseidx.com and our team will be able to help you with any question, or concerns you may have.