I am happy to report that with the most recent update to our Listing thumbnail views (Search Result pages), we have completed our overhaul of the Listing product templates. We created a long list of what we wanted to see in the new templates and agonized over a lot of minutae and after many teleconferences and heated discussions, this last update is out. I will leave it up to you to judge if we managed to improve on the old templates and by how much. Among the many things we wanted to achieve were:

• Tighten up the templates to make the listing information more prominent
• Continue to capture the visitor’s attention with the prospect of signing up
• Make listing information more structured and predictably placed
• Make navigation easy and predictable
• Create and expose various viewing options to address different preferences for larger, smaller, more graphic or more location oriented presentations
• Maintain the high interactivity of our pages, so that the visitors don’t need to lose their viewing or scolling “context” unnecessarily
• Show the visitors the many tools they can enjoy when they sign up; make tools work “in-place” so the visitors can avoid needless round-trips to the form pages
• Make the pages look GREAT!!!

The list is much longer actually, but I will spare you the rest.

Of course, you can also pick which template you would like to select as “default” for your own listings, your office listings and your search results. Most templates can be configured with your choice of items per page and you can even hide the template selector tabs, if you decide that your selected template will do “just fine” with no further options for your visitors.

In addition, it’s now very easy to hook up your own css to the listing pages. You simply provide your custom CSS URL in the Listing Options in the Private Office and off you go. Your css will be injected last, so you will have the final say in how the elements on the listing pages look.

There is another cool product announcement coming shortly; initially especially interesting for the “geeks”. Stay tuned!

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