We’ve completely rebuilt the back-end pages for managing your TourVista account and virtual tours. Here’s a tour of the new design and features that you’re sure to love.

The Home Page

A slick new design awaits when you login to your TourVista account. The home page acts as a control panel for your entire account, showing your most Recent Tours and a nifty widget for quickly creating a New Tour.

My Tours

It’s easy to manage all of the tours in your account on our new My Tours page, where you can filter by tours that are either ON or OFF, and also display them in our handy new “thumbnail” view which shows all the key data for each tour.

Tour Dashboard

Managing each of your tours is easier than ever with our new Tour Dashboard! Change the design by selecting a new theme; view graphical stats of the total views, leads and shares; and even update the contact info for each tour! You can also specify multiple email addresses to receive the lead notification emails.

Craigslist Templates and Other Marketing Tools

Of course, we are still offering our best-in-class Craigslist Templates that allow you to copy/paste code to post your tours to Craigslist. Be sure to check out our other marketing tools like the tour widgets for embedding your tours on other websites.

Pro Tip: use the drop down menu (at the top right) when editing a tour to quickly navigate between the various tours in your account.

Affiliate Program

We are now offering an affiliate program! For those of you that love TourVista, now you can earn extra ca$h by referring others to setup a new account.

It’s super easy…

1. Your account has a special affiliate link just for you.
2. Your “subdomain” page that lists all of your tours (such as matty.tourvista.com) can also be used as your affiliate link.
3. Share these links on your website, Facebook, Twitter, email signature, etc.
4. You’ll earn 25% of the lifetime payments from everyone that sets up an account after clicking on your link!

Hope You Like!

Well, that pretty much covers the new improvements to the new TourVista pages for managing your account and your virtual tours. Let us know in the comments what you think  / any questions / what else you’d like to see.

The post Getting Familiar With The New TourVista appeared first on TourVista.

Here’s a detailed video tutorial that for the Craigslist newbies that goes through each step of adding your post to the appropriate real estate section on Craigslist:

Learn more about our new Craigslist templates here and see why it’s important to include more than just plain text on your listings if you want them to stand out amongst the masses on Craigslist.

The post Video Tutorial for Posting to Craigslist Using TourVista’s New (Awesome!) Templates appeared first on TourVista.

Just go to tourvista.com/craigslist and enter your property information as demonstrated in this video:

Ya baby! Hope you enjoy!!

Not sure what the big deal is? Recently Craigslist hammered down on their real estate listing guidelines, essentially reducing all listings to plain text.  No externally-hosted images. No fancy HTML formatting. More info at our blog posts here and here.

The post Free Craigslist Templates for Real Estate Listings appeared first on TourVista.

In response to our blog post yesterday about Craigslist hammering down on images and styling , we are pleased to release the initial version of our New & Improved Craigslist Template for Real Estate!

While your competition is sprinkling in bold text and bulleted lists to their boring plain text ads, your listings will shine with TourVista’s new Craigslist design.

Here’s a video of the new templates – and if you haven’t already, setup a free account on TourVista and start using our new Craiglist template today!

The post New Craigslist Template From TourVista Makes Your Real Estate Listings Pop! appeared first on TourVista.

Nov 14th Update: We’ve released a new & improved version of our Craigslist template! Details here

WOW! is all I have to say about this.

Craigslist is now removing all externally-hosted images and most other formatting from your real estate posts.

That is, your beautiful posts created using various Craigslist templates like TourVista’s are now stripped naked and in most cases looking very ugly. 

No images. No fancy styling. No well-designed layout. 

Just plain text and some minor formatting like bold and italics. Excuse me while I barf.

Is this just an effort to blast us all back to 1995? I don’t think so. Craigslist has always gone the route of “less is more” with their design and overall user experience. Instead, it feels more like a way to manage the look of all posts for consistency in an effort to level the playing field for everyone.

No need to freak out…

While this does have most real estate marketers in a state of shock, it is actually good news.  By removing all images and fancy styling and forcing all posts to be plain text, ANYTHING that we can do to make your text better than just plain text will help it stand out.

And that’s what we are working on right now — an updated Craigslist template that takes your property info from TourVista and generates “better than plain text” copy/paste code to help it POP on Craigslist.

Stay tuned… and let us know if you have any ideas!

Nov 20th Update: Better yet – no TourVista account required! Visit tourvista.com/craigslist

Nov 14th Update: We’ve released a new & improved version of our Craigslist template! Details here

Matt, TourVista Founder

November 13, 2013 at 2:32 pm PST

PS: Craig sends his love

The post Craigslist Lays the Smack Down on Real Estate Listings! appeared first on TourVista.

It’s super easy to customize the arrow colors:

	Step 1 Login to your account at TourVista.com and click the Floor Plan link for the tour you’d like to edit.
	Step 2 Then click the link to “Connect your photos to these floor plans”
	Step 3 Click the “Change” link to select different color arrows for both the “on” and “off” states as shown on your interactive floor plans.
	Step 4 Save and view your tour! Aren’t you snazzy? But of course you are

Here’s a video tutorial that walks you through the above steps:

The post How To Change the Arrow Color on Your Interactive Floor Plans appeared first on TourVista.

But, did you know that you can press the SPACEBAR on your keyboard to play the slideshow automatically?  How cool is that?  We’ve even added a little notification at the top of the slideshow so your viewers know that they have this option, too.

You guessed it, pressing the spacebar again pauses the slideshow. 

The post How To Auto-Play Your Photo Slideshow appeared first on TourVista.

Most of our users figured out that their floor plans should be drawn such that they would fit nicely on the tour page, including cropping them tight so there was no unnecessary white space around the edge, resulting in the largest floor plan possible.  Even still, if your property had a big, complex floor plan, it became very small and hard to read.

Well, it is my pleasure to announce that we’ve updated our tour page with a link “+Enlarge” that shows your interactive floor plan in a MUCH larger view!  Yeehaw!  Check it out:

If that’s the good news, the better news is that all of your existing virtual tours with interactive floor plans have been updated automatically to show the larger view. Sweet!

Here’s a quick screencast demonstrating the large interactive floor plans:

The post Big (We Mean HUGE) Interactive Floor Plans appeared first on TourVista.

Ask and you shall receive!

The two screenshots above show (on the left) the Photos tab for an interactive floor plan and (on the right) the lightbox for viewing each photo at full size.  

Tip: once the lightbox is showing, you can use the left/right arrow keys on your keyboard to quickly scroll through the photos.

Just visit one of your virtual tours and you’ll see that the lightbox has already been applied*.

* This update applies to Premium tours only, not free tours.

The post Slideshow Gets a Super Cool New “Lightbox” Style! appeared first on TourVista.

This video demos how to get past the “Error 1 – Operation Not Permitted” error that occurs when trying to unzip a zip file created at TourVista.com.

The solution is to use Terminal, a built-in program on the Mac.

1. Open Terminal.  You can use the Mac search at the top right and start typing Terminal.  It will appear, click on it to open the program.
2. Type “unzip” and a space, then drag/drop the zip file into the Terminal window.
3. Press Enter and the zip file will be unzipped, storing all files on your computer.

Your unzipped files will go to your user account folder which you can easily access using Finder.

The post For Mac Users Only: How to Unzip a File (Fixing Mac Error 1 – Operation Not Permitted) appeared first on TourVista.