RealTown's RealTalk

I am reading all this with very great interest. I had always loved my AA site. A year ago, I could not change anything on my home page. It was all in HTML. Many emails, calls and MONTHS later they finally got it straightened out. AA claims they emailed me about it. I never delete emails until I have read and filed them. Someone had placed over 3000 backslashes on my home page. I NEVER give out my password so how did that happen, and why so long to correct? One time much earlier, a RE/MAX company back East had all their contact info in my place-all through my site. I was told to not give out my password. I had not done that. I have become increasingly dissatisfied and the hits have gone to 0 from SUPPOSEDLY averaging 1500 a month???

So-I am debating on just dropping it and going with only the company site.

Juanita R. Williams

Bray & Co Rifle

Juanita@ SoldByJW.com

Hi Meir,

I am sorry for the experience you are having with Advanced Access. Please contact me directly if there is anything I can do to help.

Anna Bourland | Advanced Access
714-685-5125

It is really a joke that you say to contact AA via any means! I made phone calls to find the mailbox full, sent emails that were not replied to for over a week, and tried the live chat only to find that also unavailable!

It is absurd that you let our mail become unaccessible for over a week! Then, to add insult to injury, I received notices that my mailbox became full and messages were being rejected! Of course your advice was that I delete some messages to allow new ones access--that would have been GREAT if I could have gotten into my mailbox!!!!!

I cannot begin to imagine the business I lost due to your ineptitude. Not to mention the aggravation and stress I felt knowing I was losing business and perhaps customers.

There is no excuse for the ill preparation AA took while switching over; not only from a technical perspective, but from a customer service aspect, as well.

Diane Glander, e-PRO

Hello,

I understand AA is saying sorry, but I don't feel sorry really cuts it. Many of us agents lost a lot of potential business this last week. AA did not even send a personal email once it was fixed stating the problem. Since a week ago thursday my emails were down. I have AA hosting both my popular emails. That meant all my leads were not being answered. I had no idea about this blog and felt AA could have handled it better. There should have been a message on the line when you called what was going on with the system. For me to have to call 11 times over the week and wait, and wait, and wait for up to 53 minutes is just rude. Then an agent finally answers and says, sorry, were trying to fix it but have no answers. The customer support completly dropped the ball in my opinion.

I was told i would not lose any of my emails, they were stored on the server, wrong, did not get any of Sat, mon, tues. I feel AA should have contacted the customers and let us know. I am extremely unhappy with AA. I don't get any leads from my site, i have been with them for 10 years and i stayed because i didn't know which was a better site to go to and how to transfer all my documentation. This is very fustrating. I wish i knew which site to try out.

Patrick,

did you change from aa? If so, which site did you go to and do you like it?

Cheryl H.

Cheryl Lichen-Hooper wrote:
I feel AA should have contacted the customers and let us know. I am
extremely unhappy with AA. I don't get any leads from my site, i have
been with them for 10 years and i stayed because i didn't know which was
a better site to go to and how to transfer all my documentation. This is
very frustrating. I wish i knew which site to try out.
_______________________________________

Cheryl, it's important for any agent to understand that the Web is a
much more competitive environment than it was when you first got your
site 10 years ago. Because so many agents have Web sites, it is much
more difficult to compete for visitors to find your site through the
search engines. To simply "try out" any vendor's site is unlikely to
yield many visitors.

That's because the "canned" content provided by the web site vendors
does absolutely nothing to attract the search engines. In today's
environment, you need to add original text content, written especially
for your site and optimized for the search engines. With enough
well-written, optimized content, a site should eventually attract
upwards of 50 unique visitors per day. If those visitors find a
reasonably visually attractive site that provides lots of great
information and photos of the agent's area, leads will inevitably begin
to flow in.

The search engines are very sophisticated now, and look for more than
just meta tags and title tags. Among other things, they look for unique
text content that is relevant to search queries. Furthermore, they will
not recognize content that's imported into your site from other sources,
such as your eNeighborhoods community information, because that content
did not originate on your web site.

So, in a nutshell, I'm saying that you will get back from a web site
exactly what you put into it. A significant investment of either your
own time or someone else's work is necessary for a site to yield lots of
leads.

However, such an investment CAN pay off. For example, I received an
email from a client in a small town in Florida last week. He and his
wife have had a web site for about two years; I redesigned it, added
content, and referred him Domain Drivers for link-building just over a
year ago. He and his wife recently switched to a new brokerage and he
wrote:

"My friendly broker is very impressed with our web site, especially in
light of the fact that several of the agents in our office don’t even
have one. He is very impressed by the fact that in the past month (our
time with him) we have written 5 contracts and 4 of them are leads that
have come off of our site."

I'm a big fan of Point2Agent sites, but just like any other vendor's
site, they need additional work. They do, however, offer a great
syndicated advertising program that can help drive traffic to an agent's
site, even if the agent hasn't put a lot of effort into improving his or
her site. Professional and Premium subscribers get great telephone
support, and during the time I've been customizing Point2Agent sites,
I've only noticed one period of less than an hour when sites were
off-line. They do occasionally notify us of planned maintenance periods,
but these usually take place late at night and usually only result in
the agent's back office being unavailable. I do recommend that my
clients consider hosting their email with a third party such as Internet
Crusade, for the added security that comes from having email hosted
independently of the client's web site. Point2Agent subscribers also
need to add IDX service to their sites, since MLS listings are not
integrated into Point2 sites.

By the way, it's very easy to copy off text from a web page, paste it to
Notepad pages, and save it to paste into a new site later. (You have
fewer than a half dozen pages of original content that you'd need to
copy.) Also, here on RealTalk, several people have recently mentioned
programs that you can use to copy your entire web site. But you should
understand that for both technical and for legal reasons, you could not
then upload your site to another host -- you would still have to
recreate a few pages. The good news is that domain name is 11 years old;
its age is a great asset when it comes to optimizing a site for the
search engines.

Suzanne

Suzanne Hathcock Stephens
Point2Agent Qualified Web Site Designer
http://www.SuzStephens.com
360-666-0881

Editor's Note
Go to http://FreeWebsite.RealTown.com and try a Point2 site free for 3 months.Saul

our website's went down for a weekend>>>>

Lucky you; I have problems (this time around) for 3 weeks!:(

Thanks,
Meir Aloni CRS, RECS & Team
Delivering results to Greater Fort Lauderdale/Broward County since 1985
All Star Realty Inc.

http://www.WeSellBroward.com

Direct# (954) 338-5220

From: Suzanne [mailto:RealTalk@RealTown.com]
Sent: Saturday, April 25, 2009 11:24 AM
To: Meir Aloni
Subject: RealTalk: RE: Advanced Access websites not functional ID00DS1G

		RealTalk Powered by RealTown Communities
	Websites-Blogs RE: Advanced Access websites not functional Suzanne Licensed Real Estate Agent Lake Havasu City, AZ Apr 25, 2009 If you want a website that is fully customizable from top to bottom then AA is the website to use. Yes they just messed up and our website's went down for a weekend but they're still the best website provider out there and the sites were still online you just couldn't work on your website and listings appeared without pictures, but if you clicked on a listing all of the picture were there. I have also been frustrated with AA and have looked at other websites to maybe make a move also, one being Point2, what I don't like about Point2: All of their templates look the same and there are very few to chose from, if you upgrade to the professional version you only get two more templates which are not customizable, with AA you can customize everything on the template, pictures, buttons, coloring, etc. With Point2 you are limited to the number of pages you can create, with AA you are unlimited. With Point2 free reports are sent out to people as a word document attachment, not everyone has word on their computers with AA free reports are sent out as the email. With Point2 you cannot customize the body of an auto email, with AA you can. The above are just a few of the differences there are more. I am also the webmaster for LHCWCR and we use Godaddy as our website provider, being an information site Godaddy is just fine, even with Godaddy you can fully customize the templates and make the site look the way you want it to. Godaddy also has a lot of templates to choose from not as many as AA but close and you are unlimited as to the number of pages you can add. Even with an informational site I am close to the limited number of pages for the Point2 professional site. Godaddy would not work, however, as a real estate website. Another note is that you do not have to keep your email address hosted on AA you can host your email address on RealTown, Godaddy or anywhere else for that matter. AA's email hosting is really bad if their site goes down so does your email besides that you can't count on receiving all of your email from an AA email account even when the site is working just fine, moving your email address to a provider that specializes in email is your best option. I moved my email away from AA over two years ago. I don't know of a website provider you can count on to host your website and your email account. I also use a different email provider for the Godaddy website. Sorry for sending out one of those long emails no one wants to spend the time reading I just needed to put my 2 cents worth in on this discussion. There is no perfect website provider out there but AA fits what I need in a website. I just wish adding your listings was and easy as adding them to a Point2 website. Suzanne in Lake Havasu City, AZ View / Reply on the Web Reply to Community Reply to Sender You are receiving this message because you are subscribed to RealTalk on RealTown Communities. If you have forgotten your password, click here. To unsubscribe from this list, please visit http://www.realtown.com/community/users/preferences.

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Suzanne in Lake Havasu City AZ wrote:

I have also been frustrated with AA and have looked at other websites to
maybe make a move also, one being Point2, what I don't like about Point2:

All of their templates look the same and there are very few to chose
from, if you upgrade to the professional version you only get two more
templates which are not customizable, with AA you can customize
everything on the template, pictures, buttons, coloring, etc.
___________________________________________________________

Suzanne, the templates provided with Professional and Premium
Point2Agent sites are incredibly customizable. Visit my web site for
some examples of what can be done with them.

Suzanne

--
Suzanne Hathcock Stephens
Point2Agent Qualified Web Site Designer
http://www.SuzStephens.com
360-666-0881