Designs

Designs

RealtyZapp Designs have joined the team
RealtyZapp is a game changer in the Real Estate world and Designs is our MVP.

What are Designs? 

Let RealtyZapp Designs bring your brand to life in the form of rich HTML email blasts, pixel perfect full color listing flyers, and incredible web page layouts that you can share & embed. If you can envision it, you can create it in Designs. If you are looking for something to help you get started, we have curated a collection of designs, ready for your to use, in our very own RZ Designs Gallery.
At the heart of all Designs is the RZ Designer, a drag-n-drop, wysiwyg builder. At first glance the RZ Designer might look intimidating but don't let that stop you. It's tamer than it looks. Try it out, pick one of the design templates from the gallery to start with. Most of templates in the gallery are ready for primetime with just a couple of tweaks.
Designs are capable of automagically morphing into your brand; displaying your colors, your logo, your photos, your content. This is accomplished by data tokens/placeholders. So imagine picking a design template from the gallery and automagically your company colors, logo, address, phone, etc. appear. Or how about you just have to pick one or more of your listings and all of the listings' information, photos, map, etc. appear. That's pretty powerful yet simple, right?
Let us say you are the creative person at your firm. Your firm covets its brand. All materials and representation must meet the highest of standards. Typically a lot of effort is put into producing materials like property flyers, emails, etc. Most of the effort being repeat effort for each and every property. Enter RealtyZapp Designs. Now you can produce a collection of design templates for your firm that meet and perhaps even exceed the expectations while greatly reducing the amount of effort. Imagine that you can now create a listing flyer template once and designate it as the standard flyer template for all your listings. And did we mention that your design template can also be designated as the standard flyer template for all the listings of all your firm's agents. Wow!


Ready to get started? 

You are probably staring at a blank list on the Designs page assuming you have not created a design yet. The best approach to Designs is to start with a simple example and then work up to the power-user stuff.

The first thing you will do is create a new Design, then tweak it a little, and lastly save it. 
Create a new Design - click or tap on the (design)+ button. A dropdown of choices will appear. There are three type of designs, Blast, PDF Flyer, and Web Page. 
For now, choose PDF Flyer. This will add a new blank design to your collection.
  1. Notice that everything is red. This means that the design is not saved yet. We will come back to that later.
  2. Click on the  >  icon to open up the RZ Designer.
  3. The RZ Gallery will appear where you can choose a template from the gallery or just close it in order to start with a blank template
  4. Now you are looking the RZ Designer. We won't get into too much detail at this point but know that at the top right are the save (check) and close/cancel (x) buttons. In the RZ Designer, save means close the designer popup and keep the work you just did. It does NOT mean the design is saved to the cloud yet.
  5. Go ahead and click on save. The RZ Designer will close and you will return to the Designs collection.
  6. Now it is time to click the save button on the right sidebar of the design t save it to the cloud. If the save button is disabled, it means that one or more required fields need attention. When the save is complete the design will no longer be red.
  7. Oh, we forgot to tweak something. Give it a try, open the design again and take a stab at changing something. Don't forget to save it. 
There is so much to teach you about Designs and the RZ Designer but this page would be a mile long. So how about we keep it brief and encourage you to visit  talk.realtyzapp.com  for more information.


Your collection of Designs

Each Designs collection record is a data entry form meaning there are fields and active elements. Obvious are the right margin buttons i.e. Save, Duplicate, and Trash. They are pretty self-explanatory. Know that Trash (delete) is permanent so use it with great caution. The other elements are from left to right...
  1. > button  - open the design in RZ Designer.
  2. icon or thumbnail image - click to open the design in RZ Designer.
  3. ON/OFF - turns the design on or off. if OFF, then the design basically ceases to display anywhere. A design that is used somewhere e.g. syndicated or pubic must be ON.
  4. name and description  - give your design a short but meaningful name. The description can be longer and tell more about the design.
  5. type  - indicates that the Design is Blast, PDF Flyer or Web Page.
  6. category  - can be anything you want. Keep it short and only a word or two. Category is used to categorize the design. For example, in the RZ Designer all of the parts appear in a categorical section i.e. Blocks, Layout, Components. Think of category as an organizer.
  7. blok  - no it is not a typo, it is blok, not block. In the designer you can create your own parts and save them as a blok. Bloks appear in the RZ Designer as parts along with all the other built-in parts. Now you see where category comes into plays.
  8. pub  - short for publish. If checked, the design will appear in the RZ Gallery for the whole world to see and make use of. If you want to make one of your Designs published all we ask is that...
    1. you provide a good name and description
    2. there is a good thumbnail image (which BTW can be created inside the designer)
    3. nothing about the design is copyright nor inappropriate nor unprofessional
    4. you don't mind that other users will be able use your design as they wish including publishing derivatives of it 
    5. you don't mind that other users may private message you
    6. if your design is derived from and similar to some else's design then give them credit for it for example in the description
    7. you don't expect nor solicit any form of compensation for your design (it is okay though if someone wants to commission you because they really like your work)


What can Designs do? 

Designs in conjunction with other RealtyZapp features affords you capabilities in a league above what any other platform is capable of. There are currently three types of designs, each with its own characteristics and purpose...
  1. Blast  - create visually stunning responsive HTML email templates for use with your email blast campaigns
  2. PDF Flyer  - create print ready, pixel perfect, full color layouts for listing flyers, postcards and much more
  3. Web Page  - create listing pages, landing pages, single page web sites which are which are way beyond plain ole HTML pages. 
Let take a closer look at each type of Design.


Blast

Visually compelling emails are the rave and responsive emails are a must being the vast majority of emails are read on Mobile devices like smartphones. Lack of standards and compatibility among email clients make it very technically challenging to deliver visually compelling email messages to the vast majority of your audience. RealtyZapp designs, coupled with RealtyZapp email blasts, deliver the highest level of results and you never have do deal with any of those technical challenges. Blast designs are specialized designs that are ready to be used in RealtyZapp email blast campaigns. You create Blast designs using the drag-n-drop, wysiwyg, RZ Designer and behind the scenes, the designer does the heavy lifting to translate your visual work into the highly complex HTML code that ultimately is your responsive HTML email. You never have to mess with any of that ugly HTML code, that is is unless you want to.
Blast designs conform to best practices for responsive email in terms of layout and structure. The layout is typically a big tall vertical column between 600px and 800px wide. This is referred to as the email body. Within the body are horizontal bands or rows. And within bands are more columns, images, buttons, content, etc. Check out some of the Blast designs in the gallery to get a better idea of what layouts are possible.
A responsive email means an email in which the content flows and morphs to look its best depending the device it is being viewed on. For example, a responsive email will morph horizontal content into stacked vertical content when viewed a mobile phone. Keep this in mind building your Blast designs. While in the RZ Designer, you can change its canvas size to simulate either a desktop, a tablet, or a mobile phone so you can see exactly how your email will flow and morph. 


PDF Flyer

PDF Flyers are really just HTML pages that are constricted to a page size and content placement is precise so that when converted to a PDF document, they are pixel perfect and ready for print. There is no disappointing overflow or cutoff.
A really powerful feature of PDF Flyers is the ability to act like a template where content is merged in dynamically upon display. For example, you could design a flyer template specific for property listings. This template, when displayed from any listing will automagically morph itself into a flyer all about that property, its information, its photos, its map, etc. Imagine you only have to create one flyer template but get to use it with dozens upon dozens of properties. No more creating flyers for each property. And because the listing information is morphed into the flyer on-the-fly, the freshest information will always be displayed. No more worries about stale information or misrepresentation of information. How do you like that? 


Web Page

Web Page designs can be anything from a simple one page listing layout to a majestic company website. When creating a Web Page design, the RZ Designer is chock full of all kinds of blocks and components and is wide open to pretty much anything imaginable. It is imagined that you will build Web Page designs and deploy them using RealtyZapp's Share & Embed and Publish API but the possibilities are limited only by your imagination.
Be sure to visit  talk.realtyzapp.com  which has a lot of creative ideas for RealtyZapp Designs. 


For you techies out there 

Under the hood, PDF Flyers and Web Pages employ, HTML, Bootstrap 4, web fonts, javascript, and jQuery and you are free to add in other stuff as you see fit.
When designing PDF Flyers, keep in mind that you do not have all the parts that are available in Web Pages because some parts just don't make sense in a PDF document. Also with PDF Flyers you should avoid anything that takes too long to render because as soon as the HTML loads, the HTML to PDF converter fires off and anything that is not fully rendered at that time will not look correct on the resultant PDF document. Images are an example of something you should pay attention to as really big images may take too long to load. By default, images uploaded to the RealyZapp servers are reduced in size and dpi for optimal web use. The quality of the uploaded images is good enough for use in a PDF intended to be displayed online or perhaps printed out on a consumer grade printer. However, if you intend to create PDFs for commercial grade hard copy print, then the uploaded images may not meet your expectations.
All types of designs are capable of using Web Fonts, especially PDF Flyer and Web Page designs but keep in mind that Web Fonts are not a best practice in HTML emails so you may want to avoid Web Fonts in your Blast designs.
With Blast designs, a platform know as MJML is employed under the hood. The wizards at MJML.io are among the leading experts in modern responsive HTML email practices and have provided the world a great framework for building responsive emails. The RZ Designer lets you build your email without ever seeing or touching any code but in the background, everything is being translated into MJML code which is then transpiled using the MJML engine into the final HTML code that is ultimately your responsive email. Isn't that cool? Please visit the  MJML.io  website if you are interested in more information.

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