Expert Guide: IDX Broker Showcase Widgets

One of the very best ways to add visual appeal and feature specific listings is by adding a showcase widget. These gallery-style widgets are customizable and incredibly versatile. You can use them to highlight your own featured listings, upcoming open houses, newest listings in a particular area — anything you can search by, you can create a widget with.

The process is quick and easy. Here’s how to do it:

Inside your IDX Broker dashboard, click on the Design tab in your main menu to the left. Select Widgets from the new options that appear, and then Legacy.

New or Legacy? You’ll see the term “Legacy” in various places throughout the dashboard. It denotes the classic, tried-and-true widgets that have been around and improved upon for years. By choosing New, you’ll be directed to the latest and greatest features added in more recent updates. In this case, the Showcase widget is a long-trusted standby, and located with its fellow Legacy widgets.

From here, these are the steps to take to create your Showcase widget.

• Click on the gray Create New button.
• Select the type of widget you wish to make. In this case, we’ll choose Showcase.
• Under Properties to Feature, we’ll choose how to set the criteria for the listings we want to show up in this widget. In most cases, the best way to do this is by choosing Custom Search.
• Now we choose the type of search. While some widgets might be simple and only require basic fields, for this we’ll want to choose Advanced Search. This will open up all of the fields currently available on your advanced search page.
  
• From here, it’s just like doing your own property search! Select the criteria you want to use. If you don’t see the option you’re looking for, you might be able to add it in. Contact Winning Agent Support to find out!
• Once you’ve narrowed down your choice of listings, scroll down to the bottom of the page. Under Widget Options, give your new widget a name. It’s a good idea to name it something simple but easily recognizable. It can also be helpful to note the intended location for the widget in the name, i.e. “home page” or “community page.” In this case, let’s just go with Home- Open Houses.

You have a lot of other options here:

1. 1. Responsive – this is set to Yes by default so that the widget will expand and shrink in order to display on mobile devices. We recommend keeping this setting as-is.
   2. Sorting Order will give you the option of changing the order in which the listings appear in your widget.
   3. Width gives you the option to set a specific size for your widget, ignoring adjustments for mobile. This field will be locked unless you switch Responsive to “No.” We strongly suggest keeping widgets responsive! 
   4. Columns will let you choose how many listings to display horizontally. Rows will be locked, since it is determined by the total number of listings in the widget.
      1. Change the number of listings in order to control how many properties show up in your gallery. Note that the maximum number of listings for a showcase widget is 100, but ideally you will want to stick to 25 or fewer for the best fit in your community pages. (Design tip: combining this with choice of columns can let you determine an exact number of listings to showcase. For example, 3 columns with a total of 12 listings would result in a 3×4 grid. Experiment and see what works best for you!)
      2. Select the “Display View All Results link” to send the visitor to a results page containing all of the listings that match the widget criteria, regardless of the widget size. 

• Click on Build Widget to generate the code! Make sure you click on “Preview Widget” just to make sure everything looks the way you wanted.

Advanced customization note: You can click Customize Widget CSS to add in custom code for aesthetic changes. 

• Time to add your new widget to your website! Copy the provided code snippet and paste it into a Custom HTML Block back in your WordPress page editor.

• Don’t forget to preview before you publish your changes. 

Here we learned how to make an open house widget, but don’t forget you can make showcase widgets for practically anything! 

Some other ideas to get you inspired:

Newest listings in a popular area (use the Days on Market field)
Listings over 2m (use minimum price field)
Available Rentals (use Property type, subtype, and status fields)

And more! Got any great ideas to share? Make sure to let us know in a comment below.

Don’t have an IDX Broker account set up yet? Sign up here and get started!