This week’s featured custom theme is a shining example of how to make a fantastic branded header. AllCities Property Management of Medford, Oregon created an exemplary header image that includes a surprising amount of content but doesn’t feel cluttered; on the contrary, it’s a well-organized and very professional-looking centerpiece of the theme. They display their company logo, name, address, slogan, phone number, website address, and a photo of one of their properties, complete with a nice red and black color contrast. It’s a textbook example of how to make a header both attractive and functional.

This theme also makes good use of a gradient image as the page background, adding texture and depth to the theme. Great work, AllCities!

Did you know that vFlyer has in-house designers that can create a custom branded theme for you for as little as $99? It’s true! We’ve created hundreds of branded themes for our users, helping them match their vFlyer content to their websites and give their listings a unique, professional look. If you would like a custom theme of your own, contact support@vflyer.com and we’ll be happy to provide you with more information. You can learn more about vFlyer’s branding capabilities on our custom themes page.

As always, if you have a killer custom theme that you think should be featured, let us know by emailing support@vflyer.com.

From the start, giving our users quality, timely support has been one of the top priorities at vFlyer. We hired our first full-time Customer Success Rep in early 2008 and now have an entire Customer Success Team devoted to assisting vFlyer users and helping them get the most out of the service we’re providing. As our Customer Success Team has grown, our goals around supporting our users have evolved as well. It’s no longer enough to say that we will try to respond to most support requests within two hours. Our members demand more and deserve more than that.

As a result of this, we initiated a regular review of support response times in order to get a clearer picture of how quickly we are responding to our users’ inquiries and how we can improve in this aspect. Used for internal purposes until now, we’re making the results of this review public. Here they are:

The results of the first review were a revelation to us. We saw that we weren’t providing the level of support we thought we were and, consequently, we improved our response times significantly in the following two months. There’s still room for improvement, of course.

Going forward, our goal is to respond to at least 95% of the support inquiries we receive within 2 hours and at least 85% within 1 hour. We’ve set up a page on our Support Wiki where we will be publishing the results of our regular support response time reviews and that you can access on vFlyer Support Time Report.  Keep in mind that the Customer Success team is also answering calls, conducting training webinars, writing help content, and producing How-to videos.

We want to do whatever we can to help our users be successful. A big part of that is offering fast responses to questions and support requests that we receive. And now we’ve got the numbers to show that we’re serious about this. I welcome you to send your comments and other feedback, positive or negative, about the level of support you receive from vFlyer to support@vflyer.com.

We have another great vacation rental custom theme this week, this one from Northern Shores Vacation Rentals in Traverse City, Michigan. It has an excellent header image that integrates their logo, website address, and a brief description of their business very nicely. They also make good use of one of vFlyer’s stock background images (the wavey blue page background), available to any vFlyer user. And the colors of the theme convey the light, beachy look that they’re going for. Their flyers make me nostalgic for my days in Michigan (go Wolverines!).

We’ll be returning next Friday with another custom theme of the week, so if you have a fantastic custom theme that you want the world to see, let us know by emailing support@vflyer.com and you may get your theme on our blog!

Happy (belated) April Fool’s Day! This week’s excellent custom theme comes to us from Mark and Corrina Bartikoski of RE/MAX Results in Wayzata, Minnesota. They created an elegant, refined theme that matches the branding on their wonderful website, www.coolshax.com. The header image displays their logo and (prominently) their website address, a sure way to drive traffic to their site. And I really like the black and white gradient they use as their page background; it adds (to borrow a popular design term) drama to what’s already a lovely theme.

The photos in Mark and Corrina’s flyers are also textbook examples of how to present a property for sale. The photos are all high-resolution and the rooms are all well-lit and beautifully staged. I can’t emphasize enough the importance of having quality photos in your flyers. Think about it: this is the first glimpse your potential buyers are getting of the property, and the photos are the first thing they’re going to use to evaluate it. If they see grainy photos of poorly-lit, messy rooms, it’s far less likely you’ll be hearing from them than if you have crisp, inviting photos in your flyer as Mark and Corrina do.

Excellent work, Mark and Corrina.

That does it for this edition of our Custom Theme of the Week series. As always, if you have a great custom theme that you want spotlighted, or if you’ve seen someone else’s great-looking theme, let us know by emailing support@vflyer.com.