Placester, The Real Estate Website Company That Has Irked Me Twice this Week

My website TinaJan.com uses a web design from the company Placester.  A few years ago, I wanted to revamp my look, my previous website went directly to my blog.  I liked that the Placester sites were specifically for real estate and they had a nice clean look with the basics I wanted.  I'm not sure if it's a realtor thing, but I like the idea of people being able to search homes from my website.  It's not Zillow or Redfin, but I think if people wander onto my site, I want them to be able to see what I have for sale, or what's available in the area that I work.  Anything else, like extra pages is a bonus.  My old website used to have a million links.  It was like a mindmap of anything and everything that I found useful as a realtor.  It had a list of links to things like the Tax Assessor, GIS Maps, every new home tract website, and more.  It had my dry blog posts of nothing but real estate news.  I loved it so much, but it was kind of a jumble of text and I wanted something new.

But as I used my phone more and more to access the internet, I noticed that my website wasn't very mobile friendly.  It looked like the desktop version, but super teeny tiny, on my phone browser.  When I had reached out to Placester customer service years ago and asked if they would be making a mobile version, they said something was in the works, but I didn't see anything decent materialize.  So I just kinda forgot about it.  

The other day I was fiddling around with my Instagram profile and clicked on my website link, and expected my non-mobile friendly website to pop up as always, but instead, NOTHING showed up.  It was a blank white page.  WHAT?  So then I went about checked all the different connections and URL forwarding stuff.  I went to Placester's website and saw that they had these new designed that were mobile friendly!  When I clicked on their previews, they ALSO WOULDN'T LOAD... what was going on?  I wrote Placester customer service about my experience and thought maybe their servers were down for the day?  I never got a response, but that's okay because today, my website is working, their previews are working, and all is the way it should be.  

After seeing their mobile previews, I was actually really excited.  So I decided to make the switch from the Classic site to the new mobile friendly site.  I worked on the new site alllllll day today.  And now that I'm trying to launch the new site, guess what?  Yup, Placester says error!  Do I need to upgrade my Legacy account?  I clicked the "Upgrade to Advanced" but there was nothing there that gave me any ability to throw more money at them.  So just ended my night by sending their customer service another email.

Well I'll let you know how it goes... here is a quick sneak peak at the new site!  Can't get a preview of the mobile though, which is the part that I'm most excited about.  I hope there are no more issues.  Placester certainly hasn't made it easy for the conversion to happen.  I had to completely redo every aspect of the website like I was building it from scratch again.  I thought it would do SOME of the conversion for me, like when blogs update, they usually don't just make you start from scratch with an entirely new site...  And their examples of the new websites look so fantastic, but when I made the "switch" it just looked like the same old website over and over again.

I just really wish they had a beautiful dynamic squarespace website with IDX capability, does that already exist?  If this conversion to launch the new Placester Codeless website gives me any more trouble, I just may try to figure out a different course of action.

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~Tina Jan~

Broker Associate
DRE#01505855

tinajan@gmail.com
909-446-2666
www.tinajan.com

Real Estate Masters Group
770 E. 6th St., Suite A,
Beaumont, CA 92223