I remember when I started to learn how to drive a stick-shift car. There was a lot of cursing, sweating, & stress involved.
It took months of daily practice before I was comfortable driving uphill, or inching my way through traffic with a standard transmission. Even with tons of practice, I would still stall my car or bunny-hop from time to time.
I was very close to saying “forget this, I’ll just go back to automatic.”
But then, I decided to persist. I decided to learn about how a standard transmission vehicle works. I figured out the mechanics behind why releasing the clutch too early makes the car stall, and why you needed to give the car more gas when you were shifting into gear on a hill.
When I learned the why’s and how’s, it made driving standard much more fun and easy. Before long, I preferred driving standard to driving automatic – and today I still miss my little ’97 stick-shift Honda Civic.
My point is, the difference between hating and loving something is often simply learning about it, and understanding it better.
For many of you, technology is your friend – for others, it’s your worst nightmare. At RealtyNinja, we firmly believe that technology – be it real estate website technology, or otherwise – can supercharge your business’ presence, efficiency, and growth.
That’s why I decided to write Real Estate Website Technology 101 (REWT 101) – a blog series for agents. I want to help you understand the technology that powers your real estate website, so you can learn to love your site, and ultimately get more out of it.
A lot of what we cover in this series is going to be technical, and some of it may not make a ton of sense to you. So please feel free to reach out to me via email or via social media if you have any questions or need clarification along the way (or do some Googling on your own!)
That being said, I’m going to do my best to make it all as plain-English and simple to understand as possible. We’re not going to get into expert level stuff here, but some of what we cover over the course of this series will definitely verge on Intermediate.
In an effort to help you digest this information in bite-sized morsels, this series of blog posts will be released throughout 2021. Each post will be short, and cover just one topic in some detail.
Here are the topics we’ll be covering in REWT 101:
Part 1: Introduction (you are here)
- Why is it important to understand my website?
- What is Real Estate Website Technology 101?
- What topics will be covered throughout this series?
Part 2: Domains & Registrars (read now)
- What are Domains and Domain Suffixes?
- Who are Domain Registrars and How do they sell you internet ‘real estate’?
- Why are they important, and what are some best practices?
- What is Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)?
- What’s the history of the World Wide Web (WWW)?
- Who is Tim Berners-Lee? Why do we care?
Part 3: DNS, Hosting, Browsers & SSL Security (coming soon)
- What is DNS (Domain Name System)?
- What are Nameservers?
- How do these two work together to get your website online?
- What is website hosting?
- How does it work?
- Why do agents need hosting?
- Why do different browsers exist?
- How are they different from each other?
- What’s the history of browsers?
- What does it mean to have an SSL Certificate?
- How long has SSL Security been around?
- Why is it important to agents?
Part 4: Listings & Data Feeds (coming soon)
- How do real estate listings show up on your website?
- What is a data feed?
- How does IDX/MLS all work?
Part 5: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Hyperlinks & Content Management Systems (CMS) (coming soon)
- What are programming languages?
- How do HTML, CSS & JavaScript work together?
- How do these languages (and others) basically create the internet?
- What are Hyperlinks?
- What kinds of hyperlinks exist?
- Why are they important to the web?
- What is a CMS? (hint: RealtyNinja is one)
- How have CMS changed the world?
- What are the benefits of using a CMS?
Part 6: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) (coming soon)
- What are search engines?
- How do search engines work?
- How can you optimize your website to rank higher on them?
Over the course of the next year or so, you’re going to see these articles pop up – their title will always begin with “Real Estate Website Technology 101” and they will each be focused on one of the specific topics mentioned above.
Their cover photo will also always be consistent – it will have a turquoise overlay like this (but the background image will change):
When you see one of these articles, be sure to dive in and expand your knowledge of website technology. By the end of this series, my goal is for you to have a much deeper understanding of websites in general – and a much deeper connection with your own real estate website than ever before.
See you soon, for Part 2: Domains & Registrars
