Brain Gardner, WordPress theme designer extraordinaire, just announced the release of a new theme specifically targeted to Real Estate Agents.

This theme comes with great features like automatic thumbnail creation and special pages for your real estate listing.

There are separate writing panels for your listings with fields for price and other items pertaining to the property. You write the data, and the theme will handle the layout so that every listing has the same format.

For Google maps code, there is a special field where you only need the location code.

It comes with four different color schemes that give you the ability to use the one that best fits your company. You also get the PSD files, so you can make your own changes or hire AgentPress to do further customization for you.

Different ideas for usage

Although this theme was developed by Brian Gardner together with Nicole Nicolay (of My Tech Opinion) for real estate agents, it looks to me like you can adapt this theme. With a few simple changes, you can make it work for different agents like car dealers, motorcycle companies, and even custom car builders.

In fact, every company that chooses to showcase their products with several photos can benefit by using this theme.

If you want to build a professional website for marketing products in the high end consumer market, the SEO-ready Agent Theme from StudioPress may be just what you need.

Want to read more about this topic? Go to Building a Website with WordPress.

I was just thinking about this project of Building a Website with WordPress and the use of a Magazine Style Theme.

As I was working on the manual for the use of that special kind of themes, I suddenly realized that the whole project was not going to work….

You see, if you have a customer that is not as WordPress and Computer savvy as you are, you need to explain how this thing with  ”custom fields” works.
And you need to tell them how to upload and choose the right image, copy the right name and paste it in the right format in the right box…
Before that you need to tell your client that he/she needs to create three images in exactly those three formats because they are needed in that post.

So do you think he/she will go through this kind of proces every time he/she wants to write a post?
If the answer is NO (really big change!) then you need to re-think the use of that kind of WP Templates for a CMS based semi-static page.

Just use a standard WordPress Blog Template and recode that in a way that your customer will be able to write and manage its website in the easiest way possible.
Only then, and really only then the client will be much more likely to work on their own website and let it grow to its real potential.

Don’t get me wrong, I really like Magazine Style CMS Like WordPress themes, but you should not use them for the majority of website owners.

What do you think? Is there a WordPress Magazine style template that is easier for “Normal” people to work with?

Want to read more about this topic? Go to Building a Website with WordPress.