Whereas actual property web sites maintain the place of a number of the most spectacular, innovative and prestigious web sites on-line, they’ll additionally maintain the popularity for the ugliest and least intuitive websites as properly.
Zillow is a superb instance of a brand new media large. What began out as a extremely secretive startup by the ex CEO of Expedia became some of the talked about websites of the 12 months. It has already been branded by the general public the “EBay of actual property websites”. Their web site expertise has resulted in lots of trade improvements and actually is altering the actual property trade as we all know it.
Redfin and Trulia are one other two up and comers in the actual property expertise area. Redfin has already dominated a 60 minutes present not too long ago and Trulia has simply obtained one other 10 million in financing. In truth in January 2007, all three of those firms had been listed in Swanepoel TRENDS Report as a part of the “High 10 Trendsetters” on-line.
Teachers report that with over 100+ million web sites on-line, roughly 6% of business web sites are actual property associated. The issue is overwhelming majority of those websites are nowhere close to the caliber of Zillow.com. Most are mere duplicates of poor actual property web site design.
I am certain you’ll be able to image them now, a headshot image within the higher left hand nook, a pixilated, poorly designed emblem, presumably an pointless, time consuming flash presentation at the start, content material which does not stand out, poor data structure, and numerous hyperlinks on the backside of their homepage sending their web site guests to websites similar to bulgariancardealers.com or real-estate-secrets-for-people-with-bad-credt.com.
At paperclipcms.com we solely deal with actual property web sites. We see numerous actual property web sites every day. We spend our days researching, analyzing, selling, and designing actual property web sites. But, we by no means get desensitized to the completely horrible design and performance of nearly all of actual property web sites on the market at this time. It is typically surprising, typically tragic and sometimes comical how poorly designed most actual property web sites are.
The topic of actual property web site design wouldn’t match throughout the framework of this weblog submit, nonetheless we’ll level out some main “musts” for actual property web sites.
1. Arrange your outbound hyperlinks and hold hyperlinks to third occasion websites to a minimal in your predominant web page. When you have an actual property hyperlink change or useful resource web page, ensure you have organized your hyperlinks into classes and solely included related hyperlinks. A hyperlink from a espresso retailer will do extra hurt than good to your search engine rating and your public picture.
2. Arrange your inside data structure in such a manner that’s intuitive and minimal. Take a look at your metrics monitoring program to search out out what your hottest pages are. Whereas most actual property site owners place a disproportionate quantity of consideration on their “about us” web page, we’ve got discovered these pages are frequented by lower than 2% of web site guests. Our testing has proven the most well-liked pages on actual property web sites have been property itemizing pages, property index pages, maps, blogs and naturally the websites predominant web page. Individuals need properties and regional data earlier than they wish to find out about what your training background is. Be sure to current your web site data in an order that correlates to your web site customer preferences.
three. Guarantee there may be design continuity all through your web site. You need to have one title font, measurement and shade, one subtitle font, measurement and shade and the physique textual content must also be the identical web site broad. Equally, guarantee there may be concord between the colours in your web site. There needs to be nice thought put into the colour combos and the interplay between graphical parts and textual content parts. For instance, in case your banner has predominantly cool, blues and purples, then carry that into consideration whey coping with your websites typography selections, similar to web page titles or subheadings.
four. Add as many properties as you presumably can. All of our analysis has concluded the identical findings. Individuals go to actual property web sites to seek for properties. They need footage, digital excursions, instructions, descriptions and make contact with data. Too many actual property web sites sustain a number of outdated listings hoping their web site guests will name asking to see a selected place, to which there response will probably be “I am sorry, that property is now not obtainable however possibly you need to come by the workplace and I can present you a listing of different properties which might be obtainable”. That is such an ineffective method to harness the facility of the web.
The extra properties you’ve gotten in your web site, the longer folks will keep in your web site and go searching. The extra properties you’ve gotten in your web site, the extra training your web site guests may have concerning your property choices and the much less work you’ll need to do sooner or later informing your purchasers of property selections. The net saves each you and your purchasers a whole lot of time. You save time since you now have purchasers coming to you with printouts of the properties they wish to see and also you spend much less time educating your purchasers. It is a win win scenario, nevertheless it requires that you just hold your web site updated and populated with many properties.
Once more, you do not have to be the subsequent Zillow.com, and also you need not do an IPO to lift cash to make sure you web site will get the eye it deserves. Whereas constructing a high quality actual property web site takes time, it is not one thing that out of attain to the typical actual property skilled. It simply takes some pre-planning and a primary understanding of design and expertise.