How To Design a Website For Your Real Estate Business

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When you’re on a job interview, you do your best. You get a new haircut, you put your best suit, you make sure you don’t have anything in your teeth. You do try to make the best first impression. Whenever a person visits your real estate website, your business goes through a kind of job interview.

People will critique what they see, and determine whether you’re worth the time they’d spend to get to know you better and do business with you.

What should every website for real estate have?

When you’re looking at how to design a website for real estate and end up with a good website design, you should think about what makes a good website and what you want to include. From industry to industry, this varies, but there are a few must-have elements for your homepage.

What differentiates you from the rest

A clear value proposition should tell your visitors exactly what you do. At first, you might think this is a no-brainer, but there are plenty of websites, and even some well-designed websites, that don’t have one.

If your visitors don’t know what your company does, who it does it for, and what’s different about it, they won’t stick around to find out. Add a brief, to the point proposition when designing a website.

Social media

Links to social media are something you must have if you want people to engage with your company on social media.

Put social media buttons in a place that is consistent and conventional, ensuring people can easily find them when they’re necessary. The social login offered by the Houzez WP theme is one of the best ways to do this.

Make it easy to navigate

Intuitive navigation that is easy to understand and use, even if someone is a first time visitor. When they arrive at your website, you want them to know exactly where they will find the info they need, without them being confused.

Bring the pages they often visit the front, to reflect the buyer’s typical behavior. For example, if you get a lot of traffic on your blog, make it easily accessible.

Make it easy for people to contact you

Contact info is essential, just think about how many times you’ve needed customer service or tech support, but couldn’t get anyone available.

However, not all prospects should be in the same position. The contact information should be easily accessible on the homepage, and the mailing address, e-mail, and phone number are commonly found in the footer.

This makes reaching you pretty easy for people who are interested. People want to work with other people, and the availability of this information will offer comfort, telling people that they can get a hold of someone if necessary.

Make it fast

Speed is the first thing they notice – how long does your page take to load? If someone has chosen you, and your website, to get information, or product, or whatever else you’re promising, you need to deliver, and you need to deliver fast.

A single second delay will reduce conversions by 7%. If that isn’t drastic enough, if your website is earning $100k per day, you’ll be losing $2.5 million per year with that drop. Now, are you paying attention?

Organize your website well

The organization is also very important, as a well-organized website will give your users a quick, clear perspective of what you, and your website, are all about. You shaved seconds off the load time, but people still have short attention spans, and you should work with them to enhance the user experience.

The page should be clearly organized with a visual hierarchy that displays what’s most important, and large and bold call-to-actions. The goal is to direct the users to what you want them to see, instead of leaving that up to them – and you should do this with the design and layout.

Value

Value is something that different people see differently. If you have users coming to your website for a service or product, that has to be top-notch.

However, it also needs to be presented in a way such that the user knows what they’re offering the moment they step on your page. If they’re looking for information, you must have quality content.

The value basically comes down to offering what you promised. If someone made a search for a gaming laptop, and your website comes up, you better offer gaming laptops.

When it comes to specific searches, it’s a bit trickier, but users prefer them to vague ones. If they’re looking for a gaming laptop, they should be on the page they enter. And if they start adding information such as display size, price etc., those should also be there.

The same applies for information – if someone is looking for info on a specific topic, or maybe needs an answer to a specific question, and your headers say you do have that information, you better deliver. This doesn’t just mean that they should need to search through the entire website – they should see it once they get there, and this depends on the organization and navigational system of your website.

Make the website look good

Aesthetics are another thing that play an important role when you design a website for real estate. You get about 5 seconds to either “wow” the visitor, or lose him.

The first impression is the deciding factor here, and it decides whether they trust you, whether they want to do business with you, or whether they’d even visit again. Your audience does have an impact on what you do.

If you want to appeal to a professional audience, avoid flashy colors and cartoon characters. This is all common sense, and it’s not about what you like, but instead about what your specific audience likes, it’s that simple.

People will rather look at an image, rather than a text, and having text on your site that is relevant to your user should be accompanied by an image that helps draw them in.

No, you shouldn’t plaster your whole website with plenty of images, because too many of them will make things cluttered and confusing, and they will end up leaving, potentially with a headache.

If you opt for the Houzez WP theme, you get a Retina-ready theme with high res graphics, for your website to look sharp and crisp on modern displays.

Engage your audience

Engage your audience immediately, and think about what your content’s voice is, and how to make it heard, yet stay within the brand’s guidelines.

The key to being successful when you design a website for real estate is finding that exact harmony because even if you have a great brand, a boring content presentation is no good. If your content is great, engaging, yet you have a weak, forgettable brand, that’s also no good.

Summary

You’ve undoubtedly spent hours learning about SEO, figuring out the ideal formula for good ranks etc. But, did you give your visitors wishes a bit of thought?

A lot of web masters forget about this, forget about how important the visitors’ experience is. If you’ve mastered the search engine ranking art, it’s time to see if you can do the same with the art of audience ranking.

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