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engenu public beta test goes live: If you want to explore the software BloodhoundRealty.com uses to build our web pages and web sites, this is your opportunity to deploy engenu on your own web server

I’ve been talking about engenu for a couple of months now. This is the software that BloodhoundRealty.com uses to build single property web sites for our listings and other web pages and web sites that we use to communicate with clients and vendors. Our belief is that the language of real estate is photography, and that, in many cases, the most effective way of communicating real estate concepts is by means of web pages and web sites.

I have been building pages and sites like this for as long as I have been in real estate, first manually, then with a steadily improving series of software programs. engenu is a further development on those ideas, designed and written from scratch this year. We have been using it for our own jobs for the past two months — to make sure that we had what we wanted, and to makes sure everything was working properly.

Here are some engenu sites we have built, both as live work and as examples of what the software can do:

What is it, exactly? engenu is slide-show-oriented software for the semi-automated creation of web pages and web sites. It is communications software, not a presentation package. As an expression of this, even though we make very elaborate single-property web sites for our listings, we continue to use a third-party vendor for our virtual tours.

Who should use engenu? Realtors — and I mean all of them — but also handymen, roofers, landscapers, inspectors — anyone who needs to communicate frequently with digital photographs.

What will you need to run engenu? Root level access to an Apache web server, a robust FTP client that you know how to use, and a strong need to create a lot of professional-looking web pages quickly and cheaply. engenu is multi-user software, so, as soon as you have it installed, you can split the workload for large sites among co-workers. An engenu web site can be edited from any web browser on any computer anywhere in the world.

Teri Lussier has written about her experience with engenu, and we’ve talked about it quite a bit over the last couple of months. If you’d like to take it out for a test drive, here’s what you need to do:

This is a beta test, so there may turn out to be undiscovered bugs in the software. But we have been pushing it as hard as we can, with good results. Moreover, nothing that turns up from here will break any sites you might build now with engenu, so I entreat you to deploy the software on serious projects. If there are any lingering bugs, they’ll turn up in live work. And, if not, you will have knocked out a lot of live work.

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