There were a few members on this forum that recently asked about customizing aspects of Birdview. You can't do too much because of the way that Birdview handles data. Think of Birdview as a one way street. You can send data for their servers to process and display the results. But you cannot extract data from their server to manipulate on your own.
With that in mind, take a look at our latest design for this
Main Line real estate web site.
One of the things that I did not like was that if a user clicks on the list of towns available to search they often get a HUGE list with some cities that the agent is not servicing (forget referral fees for a moment - some agents want a strict list of towns in their area). If you look on the right side of the home page we created a Quick Search feature that allows the user to select only select locations to search. Due to the nature of Birdview we had to have the results open in a new, generic window.
Birdview does a decent job of building a contact database, and we wanted to keep that functionality. But we also wanted the forms to look like they were part of the web site. The solution was to build custom forms and feed them to the Birdview database. You can see an example of this on the bottom of the home page.
Again, we had to have the results page of the forms to open up in a new window. One of the items that we had to address with this format was to put the required field information tests on this page (using javascript) rather than feed the data to Birdview and then have Birdview check for missing field. By doing this the user did not have to let the new window open, get the error message, close the form, and start again.
Another modification we made was on the
Wayne PA real estate page and all of the other community pages. If you scroll about halfway down you see a different type of quick search form. In this case the search is limited to the town that we are describing on that page.
On the
Main Line MLS page you can see another version of a custom form that limits the user to a select set of towns in the area. This custom form also lets you expand your search qualifiers the same way as the traditional Birdview MLS form.
You can see the traditional Birdview set up on our
Philadelphia MLS page. The only thing that we did different from most other Birdview sites was to put this search in an IFrame rather than a traditional framed page. This allows us to keep the look and feel of the other pages on the site.
Another area where we used IFrame was on the
Main Line Community Reports pages. One note about IFrames. Based upon the layout of the page on the Birdview server and the browser that you are using the IFrame may not render the same in different browsers. We had to use CSS hacks to keep the look and feel the same across the different browsers.
Anyway, that's the scoop on how we were able to semi-customize the Birdview platform. Ideally I would like to be able to manipulate Birdview data on our end, but I don't ever see them letting that happen.
There are a few more ideas that I'm working on to customize Birdview. If they work out, I will post them here.
Customized Birdview Solutions
Linear Mode
