What methods are available for IDX/MLS integration?

There a a few ways to display the IDX on your website. The most popular way is to use a type of framing. This includes either an Inline Frame or Standard Frame page. Another method available, which will usually provide a most professional look is Design Integration.

Inline Frame
By default your website is setup to use the Inline frame. The inline frame allows your IDX to display on your website.

Inline frames appear inside the presentation of a page much the same way as images are: the browser allocates some space for an inline frame and takes this into account when rendering the page. This means, in particular, that an inline frame as a whole scrolls along with the rest of the document, so it might be scrolled away. Whether this is positive or negative depends on the aims and nature of the page. (An inline frame usually has its own internal scroll bar too, for scrolling its own content. This can sometimes become redundant and become annoying to the user).

Standard Frame
Standard frames are used to divide the entire browser window (or a frame) to subwindows. Most our websites, XE and ZSERIES have a frame page available for use. The frame page is usually a header type frame that displays the IDX search in its bottom window.

A standard frame is recommended for many situations, mainly if your IDX search form is too wide to fit in your inline frame or if you find the inline frame to not display the IDX search pages correctly. Standard frame pages can also be made to be displayed as a column, footer and header (which is what we use by default).

Design Integration
This type of integration is used for our PremiumIDX packages only. This type of IDX integration is not usually available with a standard IDX link provided by the MLS. Our PremiumIDX and FirstIDX have design integration options available. This method may be more expensive then traditional framing, but basically mirrors a websites design on the 3rd party IDX server so that the IDX search pages look to be directly part of the website, but usually always resides on the 3rd party web address (URL).

Selecting this option when adding your IDX to your website will basically redirect the user to the IDX links provided.