Designing the Simulagent Zen Garden

If you are a web designer, you are probably familiar with css Zen Garden. We are working on our front end xhtml document for the websites Simulagent users will create.

As usual, I started sketching out layouts and converted the sketches to graphics. When I started creating the xhtml and css for the designs, I wondered how I could create something similar to the CSS zen garden for to handle different designs.

The competition in the real estate CMS arena is fierce. Other companies offer users lots of template choices (most of which I think are extremely weak). I want the slickest and coolest templates for our users, but I really don’t have the time or resources to create hundreds of templates. So, how will we compete?

Here is the Plan.

To kick things off, I’m going to create 4 differently structured xhtml/css documents. I’m going to ask every web designer I know and don’t know to have a look and let me know what they would do differently. Based on their feedback, we will devise a standard; our own little zen garden. From that garden, Simulagent will launch a competition. We are going to get freelance designers from everywhere involved and provide them a platform to earn money with the templates they create.

There was an article written by Mani Sheriar over on ThinkVitamin earlier this year about real world css zen. I am going to take what I know and apply it to the zen garden methods described in Mani’s post.

Real Estate Agents don’t know CSS, How are they going to change the design?

Most real estate agents I’ve worked with stay far away from anything close to code. But some have the do-it-yourself mentality. This system will allow the agents to, design the site themselves, hire a designer to customize a template or purchase one that is already created. I am starting to build a network of designers to assist our customers in this process. If you are designer interested in designing some layouts and making some cash contact me.