Blog Tag: 360 virtual tour

What a Virtual Tour Should Be

March 12, 2010

What is a Virtual Tour…or Rather What Should It Be?

Both of my parents are tour guides in BC.  BC is among the tourism capitals of the world so perhaps it is there that I get my idea of what a “tour” should be.  At Magnolia Plantation, it was my mother’s job to guide visitors through the home showing them from room to room and educating them about the history and features of the stately plantation house.  Pretty much what you might expect if you paid to get a “tour”. 

If you did an online search for the words “Virtual Tour”, you would find that there are many different ideas of what a virtual tour is.  So called tours range anywhere from a series of still photographs put to music to a full fledged video walk through of the house.  The still photographs are somewhat like trying to put a jigsaw puzzle together – you can see the pieces but are not exactly sure how they fit together.  The videos are reminiscent of watching someone’s home movies — you have no control over the viewing experience and they may not focus on what you want to see and they are certainly not an Interactive Virtual Tour.

At our assisted care photography company,  we feel that a virtual tour should provide the viewer as close to an actual tour as possible.  Here are some ways we accomplish that goal:

•    Interactive Panoramic Images – We provide 360º panoramic images which allow the viewer to visualize the details of the main rooms.  The viewer controls the speed and can zoom in to see specific features of the area.
•    Customized Hot Spots – Each image has embedded “hot spots” which allows the viewer to navigate from room to room.  This allows for a real feel of the layout and flow of the property.
•    Offline Tour Capabilities – It is our hope that after touring your property, the viewer will not want to look any further.  Truth of the matter is that an internet shopper is likely going to create a “short list” of prospective places to go back to later.  Your virtual tour can be downloaded as well as emailed which will keep your property top-of-mind when it comes time to make a decision.
•    Professional Virtual Tour Photography – We have over 10 years of professional photography experience so our eye for detail will allow us to provide you the best possible images to showcase your home.  Image editing and enhancements are included at no charge!

In this challenging market, the proper presentation of listings has become increasingly important.  With 85% of home shoppers turning to the internet before they pick up the phone, it is vital that you maximize your window of opportunity to grab their interest. 

 

Hail to the IMAGE

February 28, 2010

We were pleasantly surprised and tickled by yesterday’s RTV IMAGE webinar featuring world renowned Bryan Peterson as the guest speaker. To have him critique our photos was awe inspiring. Makes you want to go out there and practice your night shots! Check out our newest tour at KaMilo.  We spent a great amount of time waiting for the right shot and had to move fast. Once that sun goes down you only have a limited time to capture just the right “night” shot. Then that “Mr. Dusky Blue Sky” is gone until tomorrow.

Cielito Rooney
VizWizardz LLC
http://www.vizit360.com
Waikoloa Virtual Tours
Order a Virtual Tour: 808.333.6458

Tour Metro Charlotte Now on Blogged.com

August 10, 2009

I am very excited to announce that www.TourMetroCharlotte.com is now listed on www.Blogged.com. Our listing can be found here: www.blogged.com/blogs/metro-charlotte-real-estate.html

What is Blogged.com? Here is an excerpt from Blogger.com’s FAQ:
We created Blogged.com because we felt that bloggers who really put their minds and creativity into their writing deserve recognition. We wanted Blogged.com to showcase the talented bloggers across the blogosphere and serve not only as a blog directory, but also as a destination where their writings can be appreciated. Bloggers are the heart and soul of Blogged.com and it is their creativity and passion that inspired us to create this site.

Our blogs are reviewed, rated, and categorized by our editors, so you won’t have to experience the frustration of filtering through blogs that are either spam, outdated, or irrelevant. You’ll be able to find quality blogs that you would have unlikely found through a traditional blog search.
I invite you to you to join me over at Blogged.com and start following me and this blog then rate this blog! My Blogged.com profie has been updated and I look forward to seeing you there! follow this blog there.

Have a great Weekend!

Rob Armstrong
Rob Armstrong Photography
Media Tours 360
www.mediatours360.com
Visit Your Charlotte Virtual Tours Provider and Order Your Real Estate Marketing Package Now!

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Charlotte Virtual Tours

How to Setup a Virtual Tour Feed

April 28, 2009

As an RTV provider one of our main goals is to keep up with our website’s content, but as we all know, we seldom make updates to its content unless we change or add a promotional item. Two days ago our company,Virtual Vista, made major structural and content changes. During this conversion, we decided to make the commitment to keep its content fresh, thus increasing traffic and improving search engine ranking.

As a result of this commitment we decided to use the Real Tour Vision’s Blogs to keep it fresh. While researching the best way to incorporate this feature into our website, we stumbled up on this web page (http://www.rss-specifications.com/displaying-rss-feeds.htm); this article is all about RSS Specifications.

The article explains the different ways and technologies we can use to accomplish this task. The easiest way to accomplish this is to use JavaScript, but this option would defeat our purpose. Why? Because search engines DO NOT actually “see” the content of the RSS Feed, thus the content of the feed within our website would not be indexed (bummer).

Another option was to use a PHP to display the RSS Feeds. The beauty of this option is that the content will be displayed as HTML and thus Search-Engine-Friendly! This is what we were looking for! But wait a minute; we really are not comfortable with PHP Scripting, so we kept on reading.

Finally, an ASP solution, just like the PHP one, but using ASP Scripting! Please don’t take us wrong, PHP is great, but we are ASP people since ASP was conceived.

We proceeded to download the FREE code from the website and after learning how it works, we decided to make some adjustments to suit our needs.

We made some small changes and converted the code to work as a function; this function accepts parameters and can restrict the output to display a specific number of blogs and whether we want to display just the titles or the entire content.

We just wanted to share this with you all, you can see a working sample by clicking the following links:

http://www.virtualvista.net (this shows the title feeds)

http://www.virtualvista.net/Virtual-Tour-Blogs.asp (Shows the full feed)

Keep in touch,

Ric Castro
Virtual Vista
West Chester Virtual Tours
610-429-0288
ricc[@]virtualvista.net

Simple Tips for Powerful SEO

April 21, 2009

•1. Meta Title
Create your title using keywords and your farming area. Do NOT use ‘Home Page’, ‘Index Page’, or just your name in the title of your webpage. Use different titles on different pages to increase your exposure in the search engines for different search phrases. Keep this UNDER 70 characters in length. •2. Meta Keywords
Use your key words in your web page title, in the description and throughout the content of the page. Do NOT use the same keywords for every single page on your site. Target each page to different keywords to maximize internet exposure. Keep your keywords UNDER 10 per page to better target your message. •3. Meta Description
Use your description to tell humans and robots what your webpage is about. Search engines normally use your Meta description under the title of your site in search engine results. Like keywords and titles, your description should be different for each page on your website. Limit your description to 150 characters or less. •4. Content
Your content should closely describe the title, keywords and description. Stay on topic and don’t overuse your keywords. Search engines now use what is called semantic indexing, so you do not have to repeat yourself over and over to get indexed properly for your intended topic. •5. Anchor text linking
Whether you are linking to internal pages on your site or pages outside of your site, be sure to use anchor text to let search engines know what the linked page is about. •6. Internal Linking
Make sure that you are opening internal links in the same browser using anchor text. Opening a new window for every page on your website just annoys viewers and detracts from a professional image on your website. Also, limit your use of images as links and try to use anchor text navigation as much as possible on your site. •7. Website Organization
Organize your website into specific topics and dedicate one page per topic. Don’t try to explain several topics on one page. Your home page should describe a little about you and your business and act as a ‘link portal’ to information on other pages of your site. Do not overwhelm viewers with EVERYTHING about you, your business and your website on the home page. •8. Website Navigation
Website navigation should be simple and easy on the eyes. If you have a lot of pages on your website then group them into categories and provide one heading for every 4-5 page links in your left navigation. This helps viewers quickly understand the content available on your site. If you list too many links in one list, viewer’s eyes will strain, people will feel overwhelmed and you will lose visitors. Also check out: How to Create an AWESOME Email Signature -Cheryl Cheryl Waller
National Marketing Manager
RTV, Inc.
(866) 947-8687
https://www.realtourvision.com
PS – if you like the tips… sign up for our RTV eNews or connect to me on your favorite social network. My username is cherylwaller (all one word) on all of my networks.