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For Realtors that use our built in MLS (Multiple Listing Service) property feeds, we offer free Email Alerts for their visitors who want to be notified of new properties that match specific search criteria. There are professional services that offer this product exclusively, but Realtors prefer our version because it's free, visitors can create an email alert easily and instantly from any listing page on their site, the email designs can be customized, and more importantly, the properties in the email can link directly back to their own website (rather than the local MLS site or some generic page), creating a more comprehensive user experience.

We have been working to improve reliability of this feature over time, and along that vein we have recently added some new monitoring features. As a Site Administrators you may now view the MLS Email Alert Subscriptions for each visitor account and see the last time the system checked for matching properties, the last time it actually found properties and sent an email, the total number of properties that were found, and a linkable list of the specific properties that were sent in the email. This allows Realtors to know what each of their clients is looking at.

In addition, the Site Administrator or the client themselves, may add extra email addresses that should be copied on each alert. This is useful if the client wants their spouse to see the same alerts they are receiving. The Site Administrator may also turn on a setting that copies themselves on every email alert as well (some Realtors want to see everything their clients see).

We've also added some options to customize the text of the email, and add a portrait or logo image next to the contact information in the header. We'll be redesigning the email template soon to make it more beautiful, but in the mean time each client always has the option of having us design a custom Email Alert for them which matches their own site design.

We hope all these new monitoring features give Realtors greater confidence in using these Email Alerts.

Occasionally we have to perform server maintenance that makes your website temporarily unavailable (for example, tomorrow night at 8pm PST). When the server is down for maintenance, visitors are given a nice message to help them understand what is happening (so they don't think your site is broken). However, before the server goes down, they may be performing critical tasks, writing a comment, purchasing a product, etc. And so it's important to let them know that things are about to stop working. We have implemented a new alert message that will appear at the top of your website a couple minutes before the server goes down for maintenance. This will give visitors an opportunity to save their work or finish their checkout in advance.

The message is quite prominent, but it only appears for a few minutes. You have the opportunity to opt out of this message if you do not want to notify your visitors. To opt out, go to your Administrative Control Panel and once you've logged in, go to the "Admin" tab. Edit your "Site Info" button, scroll down to the "Technical Info" section and selected "disabled" in the System Alerts. Then save. If you disable the alerts, your visitors will not get this notice a few minutes before the site is going into maintenance mode.

If you do want this recommended notification, you do not need to do anything. However you do have the option of setting the number of minutes you want the notification to display before the maintenance begins. By default it's set to 2 minutes, but you could choose to display it 10 minutes before by editing the "Pre Alert Time" and setting it to 600 seconds (equals 10 minutes).  The exact maintenance times are imprecise, so a larger window is advised. You also have the option of inputting your own custom alert message, but we highly recommend you do not interfere with our carefully crafted message.

Below is the message your visitors will see:

MAINTENANCE NOTIFICATION

Please note that we will be performing important server maintenance in a few minutes, during which time the server will be unavailable for approximately 5-10 minutes. If you are in the middle of something important, please save your work or hold off on any critical actions until we are finished.

We hope that this new feature helps your visitors cope with periodic server maintenance. As always your feedback is appreciated.

We have added support for a more visual calendar date picker to the CMS. So now when you pick dates, you don't have to consult another calendar to figure out what the date is of next Tuesday. The picker supports keyboard arrows for toggling the hours up and down, or specific number inputs.

You may have noticed that your site was unavailable last friday (July 16th at around 12:30 PM PST). The downtime lasted about 30 minutes and was caused by a hardware failure with one of the core routers at the data center that hosts our servers. This affected their entire data center, including our server. It was not a problem with our server per se, but a network problem that slowed or stopped traffic from getting to our server. We take uptime very seriously, but these things happen, unfortunately, despite redundancies and backups in the network.

Our secondary backup server (located in California), detected that our main server (located in Montana) was unreachable and promptly redirected all traffic to itself. However, at the moment the backup server is not a full sync of our main server, so all it can display is a nice error message that explains the problem (not the entire website, but better than a white screen). In the future, though, we plan on creating a fully redundant backup server, so that these if one server fails, the second server will take over. That is too costly for us at the moment (without raising prices), but once we get more clients to share the costs, we'll be able to do this. This is one of the advantages of our platform, we can share the costs of hardware and maintenance over a larger group of clients and everyone benefits.

One of the problems with growing your business large (a challenge we are facing more and more each day) is maintaining human relationships with your clients. Good relationships, Good will between businesses and their customers, builds loyalty and earns referrals the old fashioned (and stable) way.

Already I see this problem in Gutensite, because I no longer have a personal relationship with all our clients (I only know the really old clients that remain loyal because of the personal attention we have given them over the years). These days though, my employees interact with our clients on a daily basis and I usually only get involved with larger clients (initially for planning) or when a client has a problem that needs special attention. This is something I don't like, I want to show all clients personal attention, but it's just not possible. At some point you have to trust your employees to carry on the values that you have carefully infused into the culture of the company. Company values are probably the most important thing a business can establish and protect.

As you grow larger, there is pressure to focus more on profit margins, operational systems, and policies. You have to do this if you want to be efficient and profitable and reproduce yourself in others. These are good, important parts of being a successful business. And clients want their vendor companies to be profitable so that they can offer good services at affordable prices far into the future.

However, you have to maintain a commitment to view your customers as people. Not just people, but individuals, small business owners, husbands, wives, students, secretaries, pastors. Neighbors with professional and personal problems and enough stress in their life that they don't need hassles from the companies they do business with.

People just want to be treated fairly. Pay a fair price for a good product or service that they need and then not have to worry about it anymore. People want to know that if a problem occurs (which everyone expects and is willing to accept once in a while), someone will take responsibility for it, apologize and fix it. It's simple, but we all can name a lot of businesses that don't get it, businesses that have staffed their ranks with people who don't care or who don't have enough power to do anything.

In most large companies, when you speak to someone in customer service, they aren't empowered enough to make a difference. They are paid to listen to complaints, to take the blame and attempt to soothe the frustration, but they can rarely help (even if they want to), because they are working in a system that limits their options and does not allow them to take personal responsibility or initiative. The customer in turns feels helpless, like they are raging against the machine, because they have no access to the decision makers, to anyone that can actually help them. This is a dehumanizing experience. Unfortunately, in order to compete in price, many of these companies have determined this is an acceptable way to treat their customers in exchange for cheaper prices. Plus usually these companies don't have any real competition (or the competition employs the same practices), so customers really have no options.

Of course, you won't be able to satisfy all customers all the time. Some people will never be happy, and will always find fault. This is a lesson you have to learn the hard way. And it's usually best to recognize those kinds of clients and determine to give them the same level of service that you give others, but if that's not good enough, suggest they take their business elsewhere, because they will only drain your energy and resources and you'll never make them happy. So I'm not suggesting that you have to always avoid frustrating clients. It's not realistic. Some clients simply don't have realistic expectations, they want the world on a shoestring budget, they want perfection, etc. But you should aim to make sure that the majority of your clients are given personal attention, from employees that do care about their needs, and who do have the power to do something about it (or have access to other people that can).

I don't believe in the mantra that "it's not personal, it's just business". It's always personal to someone. The moment business is no longer personal, is no longer concerned about the person, you have crossed the threshold and are in danger of losing your heart as a company. When it's no longer personal, then the only thing that's left is profit margin, that amoral incentive that looks through a person as if they were an old glass window. When it's no longer personal, then you no longer care about how your product effects your customers, about your customer's experience with the service, about the stress or joy you bring to your customers, about the quality of the product. And what joy is there in participating in a business like this. Sure you make money, maybe even loads of it, but is it worth it? What have you accomplished? And what have you given up?

If you looked at our Blog, lately, you might conclude one of two things: 1) Gutensite must not have much to report, 2) Gutensite must be too crazy busy to blog about all the great things that are happening. If you chose door number two, you win. Go have a free website, on us. Unfortunately, I have to admit, blogging is not a high priority compared to all the other important things that demand my time (as much as I would love to spend my day sitting in a coffee shop blogging about how cool we are).

But the truth is, we've been working on lots of great new features that we've been releasing to our community. We've also hired three new people in the last couple months to help meet your needs in a timely fashion and help us meet our own ambitious development goals.

Here is a list of the top of my head of some of the things we've been doing (on top of all the custom work we do for specific client projects, which keeps us extremely busy):

• Released Total Overhaul of MLS Pages and Features for Realtors.
• Added Directions to the "Map & Directions" Page.
• Major Server Upgrade.
• Comprehensive Data Caching to dramatically speed up page loads.
• New Admin Controls for Tons of Display Preferences.
• Additional Calendar display feature now hides past events in list view.
• New Social Media Sharing and Printing options for Articles, News, FAQ, Portfolio, Property Pages (in addition to Blog)
• New Promo Module Options for Link Lists, Multi-Tab Popups, etc.
• New Discussion Forums Functionality.
• Third Party API for the Store, Accounts, and others.
• Exciting new "Site View" (in progress) to redefine the way you build your site and organize your menu in one fancy visual interface.

I'm sure there are a lot more things but I've gotta get back to work!

We are proud to announce the launch of a new flagship Gutensite website for Alain Pinel, a local Luxury Real Estate Broker with about 1300 agents in the San Francisco Bay Area. We created the first Bay Area Open House Search website, which has integrated live property data from the four independent Multiple Listing Services in the area. This in itself was a Herculean feat, since they all follow separate data standards, so we had to create a shared standard of our own. The new seamlessly integrates this data, and provides additional features such as: map based searches, property mapping, street view, directions, favorites, RSS subscription, email alerts, and open house route planning for multiple properties.

Alain Pinel has created this site as a way to save them hundreds of thousands of dollars a year by weaning themselves off weekly print advertising for open house announcements which costs them a fortune. This website can not only save them tremendous amounts of money, but it also gives people the ability to view live results with all the extra features of searching from the convenience of their home whenever and wherever they want. It's a huge improvement for their customers, and we hope it becomes the favored standard for property searching in the Bay Area.

The new APR site used our standard core MLS functionality but we used this opportunity to make a lot of improvements that we've been planning for a while. So in time, our other clients will find many of these same features integrated in the default MLS features that power their site as well.

We just integrated ReCaptcha's nifty Word Verification API into the contact forms for all our sites, e.g. Site Contact, Custom Forms, Comments, etc. They are kind enough to allow us to customize the look to be less obnoxious than their standard design (Thank You ReCaptcha!). One of the nice features is that it's handicap accessible, allowing the blind to "listen" to words, which is super cool. And the whole project, is an exercise in collective processing power of the internet. Everyone who verifies a word is participating in a project to digitize old books! They have two words they provide, one is a control word (which they know) and the other is a new word that needs to be digitized. If you get the control word right, you pass (you don't know which is which). But in the process you also digitize the new word, and when the new word gets a high enough accuracy, it gets added to the accepted words.

It's  a great little API. And now, hopefully people will not be getting as many scandalous random words from the dictionary, which was very common with our old method. Who knew the dictionary had so many naughty words.

A big thanks to City Church of San Francisco, who kindly subsidized part of the cost of this new feature to make it a priority on our production schedule. You can also anticipate a new "Forums" feature coming soon, partly subsidized by these good folks as well.

Okay, now I'm going to yelp about Yelp. We've had some ongoing drama with the popular business review site Yelp.com. We created a business profile a while back, so people would have an opportunity to review our work and give good or bad reviews of our service. But when we went back to add more photos a few months later it had mysteriously disappeared. So we created another profile, and discovered the new profile had a funky "-2" at the end (http://www.yelp.com/biz/gutensite-walnut-creek-2). It turns out old profile still existed, at the same address, minus the -2, but was not discoverable with the search.

So we asked Yelp if they could remove the duplicate and merge the two accounts together. But instead we got a response saying that the new profile was also being removed from the search because we weren't a local business. This of course is totally ridiculous. We have a local Walnut Creek business license, are members of the Walnut Creek Chamber of Commerce, have a local office in Walnut Creek that employs local employees who do work for local clients. Sure we have a website, and we also do work for a national and international audience, but this does not make us non-local. Our services are computer based, but that is no less legitimate a target for reviews than someone who trims trees.

We complained to them and got no response. Several days passed and fortunately for us a Yelp salesman called and wanted to sell us advertising. I told him the problem and he realized he needed to fix this before he could make his pitch. So he kindly talked to the powers that be, and without comment or apology, our profile was turned back on.

I was considering advertising with Yelp, but I decided it would be in our best interest to first acquire some reviews from any of our past customers. So I asked a couple long term clients if they would do us a big favor and consider giving us a review on Yelp. Several agreed and the next day we had 5 great reviews, which moved us up from #8 for "Web Design" in Walnut Creek, to #3.

The next day I looked at our profile to see if others had reviewed us, and I discovered that all the reviews had been removed ("suppressed"). Evidently Yelp has an automated filtering system (fatally flawed) that is supposed to flag suspicious reviews, to ensure that spam or malicious reviews from competitors don't clog the review process. They say that because it has no human interaction it is unbiased. This is supposed to alleviate their responsibility, but: 1) humans write the rules of these algorithms, so it's not really unbiased. 2) we would like some human interaction, because all of our reviews were 100% legitimate. So that's not comforting. Don't blame the robots people.

In the end, their filtering system is so tragically inept that it deleted 100% of our totally legitimate reviews, so now we have no reviews, we are back to #8, and anyone that wants to read what other clients had to say about us, is unable to because Yelp's review system is biased towards young, tech savvy "yelpers" with too much time on their hands, who are able to actively cultivate an online identity and "credibility" as defined by Yelp's algorithm. And meanwhile, real business owners in the b2b sphere, are busy running their businesses and are not going to be active yelpers, so all their reviews are going to be dismissed and suppressed, even though their reviews should be particularly noted because of the extra effort they made to create and confirm a new account, learn a new system, and post a review during their busy day.

So what's the moral to the story? I don't know. Things aren't what they seem? Yelp brands itself as a local review site, but in reality it masks a caste system of Elite Yelpers and robotic censorship that skew it's credibility. But unfortunately, like Google, you can't ignore them. Most people don't understand or care why you don't rank high in Google, or don't have good reviews on Yelp. They just won't find you, or trust you, because a site they trust (Google or Yelp) doesn't say anything favorable about you. It's like being a nerd in high-school all over again, if you don't hang out with the cool kids no one will notice you. So I believe you should still have a Yelp profile, and you should ask people if they ever use Yelp and if so if they would consider reviewing you (if not don't let them waste their time). But that's it.

You can't stress it. If you do good old-fashioned work, it will pay off. Your clients will tell their friends over a cup of coffee or a beer in the backyard, and word will get around. It's easy to get caught up in these little fads, and they are interesting, but at the end of the day only 30 people viewed our profile on Yelp last month, compared to 10,000 unique visitors to our website, 90% of whom came directly by typing in our URL. Which means that most people still find us because a friend recommended us. That is priceless. I wish Yelp wouldn't delete our client's reviews, but oh well, it's not going to affect our business.