Real Estate Appraisal Web Site Maker-Create Your Own Appraisal Web Site FREE

Real Estate Appraisal at RWM.NET - Free Appraiser Web Site Design

Real Estate Appraisal Web Site Maker

Note: If you are using our order, quote or information forms and your website is NOT hosted by us then your forms will no longer work if they were prepared prior to 5/03/2002. Click here for instructions to fix your forms to make them work. If your site IS hosted by us at either AppraiserUSA.com, RWM.net, or if we host your domain name you do not have to worry, your forms will continue to work.

This free service allows you to create your own Real Estate Appraisal web site yourself right now and lets you save it to your local hard drive. Once your site is created you can either upload it to your web space provided by your internet service provider, or if you don't have web space I will host your site for $5.00 per month at RWM.NET (Details on hosting here), or you can really go first class and get your own domain name (www.yourname.com), and place your site on your domain. (Details on Domain name hosting here). If you choose the $5.00 hosting option, or decide to register your own domain name through me I will add several enhancements to your web site including special META Tags and Keywords for your web site so you will be found by people searching for appraisers in your area and I will manually register your site with the major search engines.

The following are conditions and restrictions on using this service and the web site that you create with it. By your use of this service you are agreeing to these conditions and restrictions.

1. You may create appraisal web sites for your own use, or your firm's own use, or in helping a friend or fellow appraiser with their site, but you may not make web sites using this process to sell for a profit.

2. I retain the copyright on all the designs. You may use them forever and change them to meet your needs (except changing the item mentioned in #3 below), but I still retain the copyright on the original designs. This means should you decide to get into the web design business at some point in time that you may not use my designs as part of your portfolio.

3. The small link at the bottom of each page that says "AppraiserUSA.com - National Appraiser Directory" and my copyright information must not be removed. It must stay in place at the bottom of each page. If you want to remove this information you may purchase the design for a one time payment of $100.

4. There are no guarantees or warranties of any kind that this service will work for you or that the site created will be suitable for your purposes. In other words you are using it on an "as is" basis. However if you are having trouble either creating a site with the Web Site Maker or getting your site online or working properly email me and I will try to help you.

The Web Site Maker has not been tested with older browsers and may not work with older versions. If you have either browser version less than 4.0 then go and get a free upgrade, for Netscape go here and for Internet Explorer go here. If you are using an older version of AOL, I would suggest you upgrade to the latest version also.

Okay, now let's create a site. This process does not allow for options such as which response forms are used. You must use the order form, and the price quote form. You also do not have a choice of whether or not to use the weather link and logo, you must use the default logo (it allows you to use your city, it just does not give a choice on which style logo). If you need a FREE site that allows choice of which response forms you use and weather link choices then fill out the FREE Web Design request form completely and I will email your site to you within 24 hours. Those are the only differences between creating a site using the Real Estate Appraisal Web Site Maker and by filling out the FREE request form.

You have complete control of the text and headings that appear on your site. You can use the suggested text or you can write your own. In certain cases you have to write your own (firm name, phone numbers, etc). In addition the Response forms you build will be customized with your firm name and the areas you cover and types of property you appraise. The big advantage of using the Real Estate Appraisal Web Site Maker is that you can see your site immediately after your enter your data and you can go back and make changes on the spot to make it say what you want.

Here is an overview of the Web Site Maker process. Step by step detailed instructions follow and will guide you through the process. You do not need to know anything about web page design or HTML code. You do need to know how to do basic computer functions such as saving files to your hard drive, creating folders (directories) on your hard drive and the like. The process works by using templates for each page of the web site you create. In other words each of the designs for the main pages has a separate template , and the quote form and order form has a template. You must save your choice of design to your hard drive and then upload the template to the Web Site Maker for processing. You will then be presented with a data input form where you fill in the information about your firm. Each blank that you must fill in has instructions and suggestions about what to fill in. After you have filled in all the blanks you hit the "Create Page" button at the bottom and you will be shown your page you created. You can hit the "back" button in your browser to go back and make changes. Once you are satisfied with your page you then save it to your hard drive and your site is ready to be placed on your internet web space.

If you have a problem with this process or with uploading your completed site to your web space email me and I will be glad to help.

1. Select a design
The designs are the same 8 designs listed on the FREE Web Site Page. If you have already viewed them and know which one you want go to step 2. If not click on each link below until you find one you like. Then go to step 2. Designs choices:
1.Light Blue 2. Tan 3. Burgundy 4. Gold 5. Blue/Red 6. Green/Gray 7. Blue/Gray 8. Gold/ Burgundy
Appraisal Order Form Price Quote Form

2. Save The Template to your hard drive.
Create an empty folder (directory) on your hard drive for your web site. Right click below on the template name of your choice below (not the design choices above which won't work). Choose "Save Link As" (in Netscape) or "Save Target As" in Internet Explorer. Save the file to your hard drive in the empty folder you just created.
To use a photo or logo with your design save your template choice from below:
1. Light Blue 2. Tan 3. Burgundy 4. Gold 5. Blue/Red 6. Green/Gray 7. Blue/Gray 8. Gold/Burgundy

If you don't want to use a photo or logo with your design save your template choice from below:
1. Light Blue 2.Tan 3. Burgundy 4. Gold 5. Blue/Red 6. Green/Gray 7. Blue/Gray 8. Gold/Burgundy

Below are the templates for the Appraisal Order Form and Price Quote Form. After you create your main page come back here and go through this process with each form (they are much faster to create as there are limited variables):

Appraisal Order Form Price Quote Form

Important! In order for your order form and price quote form to work you will need to edit each form as follows:

After you have completed the process and saved the order form to your hard drive, open it in a plain text editor such as Windows Notepad (click the start button and click run, then type "notepad" and the Notepad program will come up. Then choose "file" then "open" and open the order form file (order.htm) and scroll down to where you find this line:

<form ACTION="url to the forms processor of your web host" METHOD="POST"> You must contact your web host and find out the URL to the forms processor they use on their server to process feedback forms such as your order form. Then insert this url into the line between the quotes above where it says "url to the forms processor of your web host", so it will look something like this:
<form ACTION="http://yourhost.com/theactualurlhere" METHOD="POST"> Then save the file and you're ready to go! If you do not do this, the forms will not send you the information, you will just get an error. Do this with both the order and quote forms.

3 Save the Graphics to your hard drive.
If you chose designs 1-4 you have to save the graphics package to your hard drive. If you are creating designs 5-8 or the Appraisal Order Form or Price Quote Form there are no graphics so skip to step 4.
Right click on the graphics file below that matches the design number you selected and choose "Save Link As" (in Netscape) or "Save Target As" in Internet Explorer. Save them to the same folder you saved your main page in.
1.Light Blue 2. Tan 3.Burgundy 4.Gold

These graphics files are self-extracting files which means you don't have to have an "unzipping" program to uncompress them. Go to the newly saved graphics file using "My Computer" or "Explorer" and double click on it. A dialogue box will pop up asking what folder you want to "unzip" the files to and it should have the something like c:\temp in it. Change this to the folder you are currently in so the files will "unzip" there. Then click on "upzip" and the graphics files will be unzipped to your web site folder, which is what you want. You can then delete the file you downloaded which will end in ".exe". Go to Step 4.

4. Upload the template file to the Web Site Maker.
Click on "Upload File" below and you will be presented with an input box for the filename of the Template that you saved to your hard drive in step 2. Click the "browse" button to locate the file on your hard drive. You will be leaving this page.

You will need to come back here to go through this process for your Appraisal Order Form and Price Quote Form and start with Step 2.

Also you will need to come back here and start with step 5 below if you selected a design with the photo or logo option for instructions on how to get your photo or logo into your web page.

Upload File

5.Instructions for getting your photo or logo into your web page.
If you selected the design that calls for a photo or logo you must use one or your page will have the "broken" graphic symbol. That means it is looking for the graphic that the code calls for in this spot but can not find it.

No matter if you use a scanned photo or logo or one you take with your digital camera it must be saved in jpg format as photo.jpg. Not only does this give you the smallest file size so your page loads faster it also is the file name and extension extension that the main page looks for.

Once you have an electronic photo or logo you want to use the next thing you must do is re-size it to fit the page. In all probability the one you begin will be way to large, both in size (height and width) and in bytes (makes it too slow to load). But this is easily done with a graphics editing program such as Paint Shop Pro or Adobe Photo Shop, or the like. If you don't have a graphics editing program you can download the shareware version of Paint Shop Pro from my software links page here. These instructions are for Paint Shop Pro. Choose "file" "open" from the top menu and load your photo/logo file (which should be named photo.jpg). Choose "Image" and "resize". Select "custom size" from the dialog box and enter any number in the right box (which is the height) of about 180 or less. If you go much over 180 pixels in height it will still work but looks too large in proportion to your heading. You can use a height less than 180 but I would at least use 125. You can experiment to see what looks the best for your page. Check "maintain aspect ratio" so your photo/logo's proportions will be the same when resized. Don't worry about the left box (width) Paint Shop Pro will assign the correct width based on the height you entered. Then press "okay" and you will see your newly sized photo or logo. It it looks okay save the file as photo.jpg. Then just place the file photo.jpg in the same folder as your web site and reload your web site (index.htm) and it will appear in the space to the left of your heading.

If you have trouble sizing your photo or logo just email it to me and I will do it for you at no charge and email it back to you.

Enjoy your web site! Now you need to start promoting it. RWM.NET has information about promoting your site and registering it with search engines and the like also. If you have any questions or feedback about this FREE service please contact me.