I love my LinkedIn news feed. It allows me to follow what's happening in the real estate industry, read about what people in my sphere are interested in, and find new professionals to connect with. However, I've been noticing a spike in a specific kind of post that doesn't make much sense to me, and perhaps someone can shed some light on this in the comments. If you're a real estate professional, you're probably posting on social media to build your brand awareness, find new clients, keep in touch with your sphere, and network with other ...

It's an honest question. You put in the time to build your website, or you paid someone to make your website for you, you pay your monthly hosting fees, and maybe you run the occasional Google or Facebook Ad to promote your website. So why isn't your website returning leads for your business? You can try answering this question by Googling "why doesn't my website get leads," and you'll see there are multiple business advertising that they can help you get 100 or 200 or more leads right now. The catch is, you have to pay for them. If you ...

You invested in a beautiful and powerful website, which you were really excited about. But after a few months you realized it's not generating many leads. This is the unicorn that everyone is chasing. In a saturated market, how do you get people to notice your business? Once they notice you (visit your website), how do you convince them that you are better than everyone else? And then, once they trust you, how do you motivate them to contact you right now. That is the challenge. And it isn't worth paying for ads/marketing to drive traffic ...

If you haven't updated your domain DNS settings in the last year, to match the information in your control panel, you MUST to take action before January 15, 2019 or else your website will stop working when we deactivate an old deprecated server that you may be using. Last April we enabled free SSL for all websites, which required updates to your DNS settings (where your domain points). There are many wonderful benefits of SSL (security, speed, SEO, etc), but because you may have been busy (or intimidated by technical changes), you may not ...

The internet is a lot like the wildwest—it operates on trust with very little oversight and no policing, everyone has to look out for themselves. Which makes it very easy for bad actors to anonymously disrupt a website if they want to. One of the most common and difficult types of attacks to respond to is a DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service). This type of attack isn't necessarily a security vulnerability, but it does cause a "Denial of Service" when so much traffic comes to your web server that it is not able to serve real visitors. And the ...

We have great news for all our Realtor Clients in San Francisco and the Bay Area. Due to historic MLS rules, only brokers were allowed receive the live MLS feed for San Francisco property data. But we have now been given approval to offer this feed to all agents who are members of SFARMLS. So if you've been wanting to allow your visitors to include San Francisco homes in their MLS search on your site, you now have the opportunity! Approval is easy for all SFARMLS members. Just send us a support email requesting this and we'll get you ...

You may notice that a new Cookie Consent notice appears at the top of your site today. This is a new requirement for compliance with GDPR, and we've added it to try to help your site be compliant. As of May 25, 2018, websites that process Personally Identifying Information of European residents, need to be compliant with the new GDPR rules (General Data Protection Regulation). There is still a lot of confusion (and hysteria) around the exact scope of this law. But over the coming weeks and months we will likely see the European Union audit ...

We are very pleased to share news about the growth of Gutensite.   More Agents - Some of you who have recently called into our Website Support line may have noticed a new voice on the other end.  That voice belongs to Mary, who joined the team just over a month ago. We are happy to have another team member who is obsessed with providing you with expert and proactive customer service. Quick Response Goal - We promised a 24-hour return response time for regular email support tickets.  This is pretty standard for our industry, but we ...

We are extremely excited to be nearing the end of a major Gutensite platform rebuild which will offer a completely new design, workflow and modern framework. This ambitious work on the 2.0 platform has taken all of our attention for the last 2 years. We will be sharing more information about 2.0 really soon, but in the meantime, one benefit of this development is going to be available for all our clients on the current 1.0 platform as well. So the good news is that we have just finished our new system for automatically providing free SSL ...

Some time ago, Google had updated it's reCaptcha spam filtering plugin to be more user-friendly, labeling it as V2. In case you're not familiar with it, reCaptcha is a powerful tool that has been used on most Gutensite forms and contact pages to prevent robots from obnoxiously sending spam emails out to you. Effective February 28th, 2018 the original reCaptcha V1 spam filter has been deprecated and can no longer be used. What this means for you is that if you have not made use of and added the new reCaptcha to your website yet, you'll find ...

It’s important to run an organized and optimized business. Bad processes will cost time, resources, sales, customer dissatisfaction and loss of team moral. So you need to constantly evaluate the biggest pain points at each stage of your growth, because these constantly change. Then you have to create the processes that fuel your success. But you can't let perfect be the enemy of good. And 80/20 is an important principle in business and life that prevents you from getting bogged down and never reaching your goals, i.e. sometimes 80% is good ...

Whether or not SEO is a major part of your marketing strategy (and it should at least be one factor), you need to comply with the basic best practices to ensure that your site is found by people searching for your product/service. This is free traffic, free advertising. Each organic search visitor is like picking up a dollar bill off the ground (or ten). The basics of SEO include: Write fresh, keyword-rich content that appeals to customers in every stage of their buyer's journey. Tag your content with the appropriate meta data (e.g....

Creating and growing a business is hard work. Competition is always fierce. There is rarely a clear path to success. You have to bring your idea into existence through sheer will power. You force an idea to become reality. You face obstacles that stop most people from trying. You make the best decisions you can, with the limited information and resources you have. You fail. Over and Over. It's messy. And then sometimes you succeed. This type of chaos isn’t an excuse for poor planning or bad management. We’re talking about the type of chaos ...

Network Outage Gutensite experienced a network outage on Thursday, October 26th between 9:49pm and 10:03pm PST (around 14 minutes). This was caused by a network problem at the Dallas Linode datacenter. We have great redundant server infrastructure, but issues that happen at the base level network issue are beyond our control. We are discussing plans for future redundancy by expanding hosting across multiple datacenters, so that may be an option in the future. We apologize for any inconvenience. If you have any questions, please feel free ...

We've completed phase 2 of our upgrades which gives us new servers that are faster, more secure, have more redundancy and are running newer operating systems for better long term support. Faster with HTTP 2.0 This upgrade also enables HTTP 2.0 for all websites with SSL (Secure Certificates). HTTP 2.0 allows pages to load much faster by enabling multiple concurrent connections at once. That means if your page has 50 resources that have to be loaded (e.g. HTML, CSS, Javascript, and image files), instead of loading one at a time, all 50 can ...

Our planned web server infrastructure upgrades were completed successfully. It required some key changes to the Gutensite platform to allow sessions to persist across multiple servers, and for custom files to be accessible on all servers. Big thanks to Matt for taking on this task. The new infrastructure allows us to do true "horizontal scaling", with load balancing and much better redundancy. That means that your website is hosted on multiple servers at once. Every page load is distributed across a network of servers that are balanced ...

  At 8:00pm PST last night (Tuesday March 7) two of our servers were taken offline for a 6 hour scheduled maintenance window, as part of Rackspace's standard infrastructure upgrades. This caused confusion for some clients because we failed to provide you with proper notification. Rackspace had scheduled the maintenance back in February 21, but we incorrectly interpreted the scope of the maintenance and didn't realize it would effect these two servers, so we did not notify the clients effected. When the servers went offline, we immediately ...

We've been building websites for 17 years. We've met some great professionals who create gorgeous, effective, sensibly-priced websites for small businesses in need. But for every one of them, I've met a lot more who charge too much, know too little, and are more likely than not to suddenly stop answering client calls one day — who prey on those who lack the right industry knowledge to defend themselves. To level the playing field, I've summed the most important lessons you need to know into this five-point buyer's guide meant to help ...

Hardware Maintenance for All Servers Rackspace will be performing maintenance on our servers between Saturday, February 18, 10:00pm and Sunday, February 19, 12:00am PST. During this time, websites may be temporarily inaccessible to your visitors. Maintenance Information Rackspace will be replacing hardware for our servers to ensure they continue running optimally. However, to do this, our servers must be powered down which will result in a temporary loss of network connectivity. Once the new hardware is installed and powered on, ...

Optimization Maintenance for All Servers   Rackspace notified us that they will be performing maintenance on our servers later this week. The maintenance will be affecting all servers and may affect different services at different times. This will take place in the time period between Thursday, March 24, 8:00pm to Friday, March 25, 12:00am PST.   The reboot should only take less than a minute and all websites should come back online on their own. But we will be monitoring the process and will respond to any problems ASAP. This ...