Happy Friday! This week’s custom theme is from Richie Caliendo at Caliendo Automotive. I love the header image in this theme, with its classic-car look and elegant black background. This is one of the best auto dealer custom themes I’ve seen yet! Also, Richie takes advantage of our Showcase layout for Craigslist (see picture below), which has a nice big photo at the top of the Flyer to give the prospective buyer a better view of the car. The Showcase layout is one of 9 Craigslist layouts available to business subscribers when they use a custom theme. Other information and photos of the vehicles are displayed below the huge photo at the top.

Great custom theme, Richie!

Once again, for a useful introduction to creating and using custom themes, take a look at this series of short video tutorials on our website.

We’ll be back next Friday with another Custom Theme of the Week, so if you’ve created or seen a custom theme and think it should be spotlighted, let us know by emailing support@vflyer.com.

We’re introducing a new blog feature, the “Custom Theme of the Week”. We have so many great custom themes that our members have created using the Theme Editor and their own creativity and resourcefulness, we decided we had to show them off to the rest of the world. This week’s custom theme is from Ryan Hinricher at InvestorNation. Ryan made great use of an uploaded background image and a header image that’s seamlessly integrated with the background. I especially like the upward-pointing arrow in the logo and the contrast of white and blue between the header and background; it gives me a whole new way of thinking about what’s possible with the Theme Editor. Everyone on my team is quite impressed by this custom theme. Nice work, Ryan!

vFlyer’s Theme Editor enables any user to create his or her own custom theme and any business subscriber to upload a branded header image to a theme. It’s a great way of making your Flyers stand out from the rest, and the branding capabilities for business subscribers provide a vehicle for putting your brand front and center on your Flyers. For a useful introduction to creating and using custom themes, take a look at this series of short video tutorials on our website.

We expect to post a new theme every Friday, so keep an eye out for more fantastic custom themes. And if you’ve created a custom theme and think it should be spotlighted, let us know by emailing support@vflyer.com!

The last few weeks have been busy at vFlyer and I wanted to fill you in on some of the great new features we’ve introduced in that time. There are four new features and capabilities in particular that I want to highlight:

First, we added 8 new Craigslist layouts for our vFlyer business subscribers when you publish a Flyer using a custom theme. Now you can choose how your flyers will look on Craigslist. You want bigger photos? Check. You want creative and attractive layouts? Check. See for yourself… New Craigslist Layouts. Also, visit the vFlyer Support Wiki for information on how to use these new Craigslist Layouts.

Second, we enhanced our print content for our vFlyer business subscribers. Now when you print a Flyer that uses a custom theme, you will get a whole second page full of photos. This feature was added due to the popular demand of our users. You see… we do actually listen to you. There are more print layouts on the way.

Third, we added a new narrow blog layout for our vFlyer business subscribers. The blog layout is 480 pixels wide and thus fits most major blog sites including Active Rain and Localism. When you publish a flyer with a custom theme, you can access the blog layout HTML by selecting Blog from the HTML drop-down menu. Then all you have to do is copy and paste the HTML to the blog of your choice. It’s that easy!

Last but not least, you can now share your Flyers on Twitter. When you publish a Flyer, a Share on Twitter link will appear under the More Options section on the right side of the Publish Successful page. We have even created a special shortened URL for Twitter that fits well within the 140 character limit. If you want to get the word out about your Flyer, use Twitter and you can connect with millions of others. For more information on the rapidly increasing popularity of Twitter, check out this article from TechCrunch.

We hope you enjoy these new features. As we continue to enhance our services to make vFlyer better and better, feel free to offer any suggestions you have on how we can make vFlyer work best for you. Send your feedback to support@vflyer.com. We look forward to hearing from you!

Many of you have no doubt seen this already, but We recently redesigned the logged-in homepage to make it cleaner and easier to navigate. We changed the Flyer and Widget Dashboards so that they’re both accessible within the same frame via different tabs and added an Image Dashboard where you can easily upload images and access images you’ve already uploaded and enhanced using our Watermark Plus image enhancement program. In addition, we added a News Feed to give you updates on what’s new with vFlyer and a feedback widget so that you can send us your questions, comments, and suggestions right from your account.

We hope these changes make your experience of using vFlyer even better. If you have comments about the new logged-in home layout, feel free to send us a message through the feedback widget!

I am pleased to announced the first of many service releases to support members outside the U.S. This release focuses on the needs of Canadian members. First, we added support for Canadian addresses and currency. Second, we added support for automatic submission of Canadian listings to Backpage.com and Vast.com. We expect to add more partner sites for Canadian listings in the coming months. Third, we updated our registration process to enable Canadian users to enter their postal code and timezone so that we can provide traffic reports and display times on your listings accurately. I am certain that we will receive more suggestions from our new and existing Canadian members. Thanks in advance.

Here is an example of one of the first published flyers with the new Canadian support:

vFlyer has introduced capabilities for vFlyer Starter members and above to add search and sort functions to their Account Profiles. What this means is that you now have the option of enabling viewers of your Account Profile (the web page that displays links to all your active vFlyer listings as well as your contact information, your photo and logo, a description of your business, and links to other websites) to search within particular categories of listings and sort listings by price, title, or date created. If you have multiple categories of listings such as For Sale and For Rent, this also means that end users can choose to filter to see the listings for just one of them.

We also introduced the option of setting the number of listings displayed per page (which used to only be five) at 5, 10, 20, 50, or all listings on one page.

To add search and sort functions and set the pagination of your Account Profile, click the Account tab, then click the Settings link. There you’ll see new options for showing search and sort and setting the number of listings per page. Once you’ve made changes to your Account Profile settings, click Update.

What’s significant about these enhancements? Well, in a nutshell, they make your Account Profile, already a useful marketing tool, immensely more useful to both you and the viewers of it by allowing for a more customizable display of listings and making it easier for viewers of it to find listings that fit their needs.

We expect that these changes will increase the number of vFlyer members who embed their Account Profiles in their websites. To put your Account Profile on your website, you (or whoever manages the website) will need to use an iframe to do so. An iframe is an HTML tag that inserts one web page into another and displays it in a frame. To embed your Account Profile using an iframe, follow these steps:

1. Copy the URL of your Account Profile. You can access the URL by clicking the Post Flyer tab from the Flyer Editor or the Post your Flyer quickly & easily link from your Flyer Dashboard. The URL will be labeled “Link to your Gallery.”

2. Open the HTML file for your website.

3. Copy and paste this code:

<iframe src=”Account Profile URL&Prime height=”1000&Prime width=”900&Prime></iframe>

Where “Account Profile URL” is, replace the text inside the “” with the URL of your Account Profile and leave the quotation marks. Paste this code where you want the Account Profile to appear on the page. Depending on how large you want the Account Profile to appear on the page, you can adjust the height and width dimensions accordingly.

We’ve gotten a number of requests from our members over the last few months for information about vFlyer Agency Edition, so I wanted to write a post that explains what vFlyer Agency Edition is and how it can benefit vFlyer users.

vFlyer Agency Edition is an account configuration that allows real estate agencies, property management companies, marketing firms, and other organizations that require multiple accounts to create and assign sub-accounts, which are essentially normal vFlyer accounts that are under the management of a main account. The manager and any assistants of the main account can access all sub-accounts via a drop-down list and have the power to assign these sub-accounts to to others so that they can create, edit, and publish content in them. Those assigned to sub-accounts will only have access to the sub-account to which they are assigned.

The main benefits of vFlyer Agency Edition in these scenarios are:

1. You can assign sub-accounts to your employees, team members, or clients for less than what it would cost to set up stand-alone vFlyer accounts for each of them.

2. As the account manager, you have the ability to coordinate and oversee the content in each sub-account so that, for instance, you could have all the sub-accounts use a custom branded Flyer theme you created in the main account to maintain consistency across your company’s or organization’s listings.

vFlyer Agency Edition is ideal for:

1. Real Estate Agencies and Broker Offices
2. Auto Dealership Groups
3. Property Management Companies
4. Mortgage Brokers advertising Realtor listings
5. Marketing and Graphic Design Firms

vFlyer Agency Edition is also a great tool for individual vFlyer members and small companies who have different categories of listings that they want to keep separate from each other. For instance, if you are a Realtor marketing properties in different locations, or properties both for sale and for rent, you could create a sub-account for each that you could access from your main account. Not only does this allow you to manage your listings more easily, it also gives you a separate Account Profile for each sub-account so that viewers of each Account Profile only see the listings you want them to see.

vFlyer Agency Edition is available to vFlyer Premium and vFlyer Professional members.

There is no additional charge for unassigned sub-accounts, which share the Flyer allocation of the main account. In other words, if you have a vFlyer Professional account and you create four sub-accounts, those four sub-accounts as well as the main account all pull from the same allocation of 125 available Active Flyers.

Assigned sub-accounts, on the other hand, have their own allocation of Flyers and are charged based on this allocation. The main account manager can specify the subscription plan associate with each sub-account. Typically, the sub-accounts are discounted at 20% off the normal subscription price. The manager of the main account can specify whether the main account is billed for assigned sub-accounts or the individual sub-account user is billed directly for his or her sub-account.

To learn more about vFlyer Agency Edition, send us an email at sales@vflyer.com.

We’re excited to announce that you can now search for Flyers in your vFlyer account by title, price, street address, city, state, and zip code! This new search feature will hopefully make locating individual Flyers much easier, especially for those of you with dozens of listings to manage.

On your Flyers page, you’ll now see a Search Options link. Clicking this link will bring up a search field and a drop-down menu where you can select the search criteria (whether you want to search by title, price, etc.). You can also specify whether you want to search all of your listings or just active, draft, or expired listings.

Happy Searching!

Earlier this week, vFlyer launched its new Theme Editor, which allows vFlyer business subscribers not only to customize the colors, fonts, and background patterns of their Flyers but, more importantly, to upload custom branded header images to them. In other words, any vFlyer Starter member or above can add his or her branding to the Flyers in the account… at no extra cost! This is a huge benefit to all you vFlyer business subscribers because it allows you to personalize your Flyers and streamline them with your websites and other marketing content in a way that wasn’t possible before.

In addition to the option of uploading a custom header image, you can also choose from over 25 new broker themes including ERA, GMAC Real Estate, Realty Executives, EXIT Realty, Long & Foster, and many others, or create a text header in the Theme Editor. Also, these 25+ broker themes are themselves customizable, so you can change them to your liking as well.

To create a custom header image, all you need is an image editing program on your computer, whether it be PhotoShop, MS Paint, or another program. What a number of our members are doing is taking a screen shot of their websites, cropping the portion of the image they want to use in the header, and then adjusting the image dimensions. The ideal dimensions of custom headers are 754 x 82 pixels. In your custom header, you can include your logo, a photograph of yourself, graphics from your website… you name it. If you aren’t able to create your own custom header image (or you want a professional designer to do it for you), you could have a graphic designer do it or alternately, vFlyer could create one for you for just $99 through the end of November. Here is an example of one that we created to match this member’s website.

We are really excited about the new Theme Editor because it makes vFlyer immensely more valuable to our users, giving you all expanded capabilities to customize your Flyers. If you try out the Theme Editor and have some comments about it, let us know! You can email your comments to support@vflyer.com. And if you’re especially proud of a custom theme you created, we’d love to see it! Feel free to send a link to a Flyer that uses the custom theme.

As in many industries, increasing numbers of auto shoppers are beginning their searches online instead of at the lot. What this means for auto dealers (particularly independent dealers who don’t have all the resources of a dealership group) is 1) you better have a website, and 2) you better be marketing your vehicles effectively on your website. An obvious way to do this is to put your vehicle inventory on your website so that visitors to the site can view photos and get information about each vehicle you are selling. There are companies sprouting up every year whose sole function is to provide auto dealers with an inventory of their vehicles for their websites. If you’re a vFlyer member, however, you should know that you already have an inventory built into your vFlyer account! Your vFlyer Account Profile effectively serves as a vehicle inventory website as it displays all your active listings, with a link to each Flyer, a thumbnail photo, and summary information about each vehicle.

If you haven’t set up your vFlyer Account Profile, you should do that right now (or at least immediately after you finish reading this post). Your Account Profile is a valuable marketing tool where you can display your contact information, a description of your business, your photo and logo, and (if you are a vFlyer business subscriber) links to other relevant websites. Also, if you’re a business subscriber, you can choose from a number of design themes for your Account Profile (including custom Flyer themes that you’ve created). So you see, if you are an auto dealer, simply by having a vFlyer account, publishing Flyers in it, and setting up your Account Profile, you have a vehicle inventory to utilize on your website!

vFlyer member Elton Rosales of KD Auto Sales in New Braunfels, Texas utilized his vFlyer Account Profile as a vehicle inventory on his website. Click here to see.

To put your Account Profile on your website, you (or whoever manages the website) will need to use an iframe to do so. An iframe is an HTML tag that inserts one web page into another and displays it in a frame. To embed your Account Profile using an iframe, follow these steps:

1. Copy the URL of your Account Profile. You can access the URL by clicking the Post Flyer tab from the Flyer Editor or the Post your Flyer quickly & easily link from your Flyer Dashboard. The URL will be labeled “Link to your Gallery.”

2. Open the HTML file for your website.

3. Copy and paste this code:

<iframe src=”Account Profile URL&Prime height=”1000&Prime width=”900&Prime></iframe>

Where Account Profile URL is, replace the text inside the quotation marks with the URL of your Account Profile (and leave the quotation marks). Paste this tag where you want the Account Profile to appear on the page. Depending on how large you want the Account Profile to appear on the page, you can adjust the height and width dimensions accordingly. You can also set the height and width by percentages instead of pixelage (e.g., “90%”).

If you use your vFlyer Account Profile as a vehicle inventory on your website, send a link to the page to support@vflyer.com. We would love to see it!

By popular demand, we’ve introduced a new Print Flyer function on all vFlyer landing pages. This allows viewers of any vFlyer to print a simplified version of the Flyer with the title, summary information, main photo and up to four gallery photos, location information, map, contact information, and photo and logos. This means that if you’re a real estate agent and a potential buyer finds one of your vFlyers through one of our partner marketplaces such as Trulia, that person can simply click the Print Flyer link instead of having to try to print the landing page itself (which isn’t set up to be printed) or (dare I say) write down the necessary information for the listing. In other words, this new Print Flyer link makes your vFlyer landing pages that much more functional and valuable to both you and the viewers of your vFlyers. And isn’t that the whole idea?

Here’s an example of the new print version:

Our members have always been excited about our Widgets because they’re an easy and effective way to increase traffic to their Profile and Listings, but we realized that there was room for improvement. In the prior release, Widgets could either display all of your active listings or just one of them. So we decided enough is enough and, a few weeks ago, rolled out some major enhancements to our Widgets. Now, when you create a Widget, you can:

In other words, we’ve given you more control over the content of your vFlyer Widgets. For example, if you wanted to highlight your listings from a particular subdivision, you could create a Widget that displayed just those listings. Or, if you had both rental and for sale listings in the same account, you could create a separate Widget for each. Or, if you wanted to include a non-vFlyer web page in one of your Widgets, you could do that too.

Creating a List allows you to decide which listings to show in a particular widget. A List works in the same way as a music playlist; you choose the items for the list, just as you would choose the songs for a playlist. When you create a Multi-item Widget, you simply choose the List you want to use for that Widget.

To include content not hosted by vFlyer in a Widget, use a Teaser. A Teaser is an enhanced link designed for use in vFlyer Widgets. Each Teaser requires a title and a URL, where the link in the Teaser will take viewers. Additionally, you can add a price and summary information and upload photos to your Teasers. You can then add Teasers to your Lists just as you would add Flyers.

We’re thrilled to be allowing our users to integrate externally-hosted web content into their Widgets and decide which of their Flyers and Teasers to put in their widgets. We hope that you all take advantage of these great new features!

We are excited to announce the addition of FrontDoor as a syndication partner for Residential for Sale Listings. FrontDoor is the newly-launched and highly anticipated real estate website of HGTV, the television network that gave us House Hunters and Designed to Sell. Following the lead of those shows, FrontDoor takes a comprehensive approach toward the buying and selling of a house.  In addition to listing millions of properties for sale around the country, it provides useful, accessible tips to sellers about raising home values, home staging, and other topics, and to buyers about what to look for when shopping for a house. 

We recently added the real estate marketplace CyberHomes as a syndication partner site, which means that real estate for sale listings can now be automatically submitted there! This is great news, as this website is a rising stars in the world of online real estate marketplaces. CyberHomes (which is the exclusive provider of real estate listings to AOL) offers detailed information and statistics on homes for sale, neighborhoods, and metro areas around the country as well as market trends. It also provides useful reference material for buyers and sellers of homes. Be sure to update and republish listings to take advantage of this new service benefit.