The atHome Group marketing and IT teams are currently setting up a real-estate information and news blog based on WordPress. The blog will have various objectives:

• Electronically publish information that atHome Group previously published in their paper magazines, like the famous “Immo Stats”, a complete price guide to luxembourgish real-estate.
• Inform and train agents about the existing and new features of the real-estate portals operated by atHome Group.
• Publish researched and valuable articles about the real-estate business and economy in the countries atHome operates (Luxembourg, Belgium, France and Germany).

Read on to find out why we choose WordPress as our blog system, and what plugins I think are interesting.

Why WordPress ?

The decision to use WordPress was an easy one. First of all, some people at atHome already knew and used WordPress before, which made it a good choise it terms of knowledge to acquire. Secondly, REA Group, to which atHome Group belongs, also chose WordPress as the “group standard” blogging platform. In the future, all of REA’s portal websites will feature one or more blogs powered by WordPress, and probably also interfaced with the group’s content management system, EMC Documentum.

Setting up the project

So how do we go about this project? atHome didn’t have a blog yet, so this is a new project. As other members of REA group already run their blogs, I first checked what the group’s vision of a real-estate blog was, and double-checked this with the communication managers down in Australia. Being member of a group means that you have to conform to certain standards, and it also means that you don’t have to re-invent the wheel over and over again, which is often good. I admit that sometimes it would be better if we could just do stuff our way without asking, but that’s not how a group works.

The imagined (and simplified) planning is this:

1. Create a small task-force to handle the project: the girls from marketing, to make sure we get their needs. One graphics designer, who would handle all of the graphical work (theme, layout, …), and one IT guys who would handle the installation, maintenance, roll-out and documentation of the technical part.
2. Setup a local copy of WordPress so that people could start playing around.
3. Have the web designer work on a graphical theme that fits marketing’s needs, and the group’s identity.
4. Check with the guys in Australia what their experience was so far, and what caveats we should be looking out for, especially in terms of SEO for instance.
5. Install needed plug-ins and train the marketing people on how to use them.
6. Rollout a private pre-release version of the new blog so that top management in Luxembourg and Australia can approve and validate.
7. Start adding real contents to the blog.
8. Do a final pre-release verification run.
9. Make sure all maintenance and back-up procedures are setup and documented.
10. Release to the public.
11. Have a beer to celebrate.

Currently, we’re at step 6. I could already show you some screenshots of the new blog, but you’ll have to wait till I’ve made sure that is OK for my management .

Interesting plug-ins

Here’s a list of interesting plugins we’re probably going to use:

• ShareThis : interesting to attract traffic and get incoming links, which is good for SEO.
• All-in-One SEO Pack : it’s never been so easy to have a perfect SEO setup for WordPress.
• ZDMultilang : as we’re operating in 4 different languages, we need a tool to handle this within WordPress.
• Some survey plug-in, as we’d like to question our visitors on different subjects. We haven’t made a final choice for this one yet, though.
• Google Analyticator : as easy as it gets to integrate Google Analytics into WordPress.
• WP Super Cache : to have the speed!
• Subscribe2 : allows readers to be notified by E-mail when new posts are published. This is probably needed because our customers, the real-estate agents, are not always tech-savvy enough to understand how to use RSS feeds.
• Google XML Sitemaps : generates XML sitemaps and sends them over to Google. It’s free so why not use it, even if it will probably not make a big difference as WordPress is already highly SEO.
• NextGEN Gallery : to give the marketing people an easy way to publish nice picture galleries.

As we work on, be sure to come back regularly. I will post some screenshots soon and let you know how the release went!

In the meantime, check out some of REA’s blogs to get an idea what we’re building…

• Propertyfinder’s Out there blog
• The REA group blogs

Update 25th January 2009 : I stumbled on this article : http://realestate.about.com/od/bloggingforrealestate/fr/wordpress_rate.htm

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