There are times in every Realtor's day when you need the ability to "surf the
web" without actually being online. This is an especially useful timesaver when
you need a quick reference, and doubly useful for making presentations.
Agents enjoy the idea of being able to show off their own personal Web sites
and favorite links to buyers and sellers during open houses and other
occasions. For these occasions, keying in different Web addresses and waiting
for them to load not only slows things down, but takes your attention away from
your audience.
While I use several different tools to achieve this result, the
most effective wat is also the cheapest - free!
The latest version of Internet Explorer (5.x) offers quite a few new functional enhancements but the most impressive is the ability to capture
web pages for viewing offline.
How it works is simple. Whenever you choose to add a website to
your "favorites" there's now a checkbox for "Make available
offline" and selecting this option is all you have to do!
After that, any pages you visit from links on that site will be
stored to your local hard drive for viewing offline in the future.
Thus, if you want to display a website (yours or anyone else's)
offline, you simply need to be online once, in order to visit all
of the links you'll want to present later. If your site has 10
pages, just follow links to load each one once, and that's it!
Now, when you're in front of your client, customer or an audience,
all you need to do is start Internet Explorer and choose the saved site from
your "favorites." If you're offline, the browser will ask if you would
like to view "offline" or if you want to "connect." Choose
"offline" and you'll now be able to display all of the pages you
had previously visited!
NOTE: You can also perform this magic with existing "favorites" by
editing their "properties" and selecting the "make available
offline" checkbox from there.
ADVANCED USER TIP: There's just one limitation, you can't save
pages that are accessed through a search function, only by
following links. So, if your site has a "link" to your listings,
you're all set. But, if instead, you have a search script to
access your listings, then you'll simply need to save each listing
as a separate link.
For this reason, and quite a few others, if you're still working
with an older version of Internet Explorer, it's time to upgrade. And, yes,
it's still free.
Simply go to: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/ and get the latest version for yourself!
Published: August 6, 1999
Use of this article without permission is a violation of federal copyright laws.
