Well, you shouldn’t be. After all, no one else is in love with your website. I know your visitors certainly are not. Don’t worry. I’m sure no one is in love with my own real estate website either. Of course, if your real estate website is actually generating business, then it might be OK for you to be in love with it.But what about all of those fancy graphics? Maybe you have one of those models that walks on to your screen and starts talking to you. Every once in a while you see one that looks as good as Cameron Diaz, but I bet your visitors try to turn the sound off as soon as she starts warbling about how wonderful the site is. You maybe have one of those scrolling banners crawling along the top of the home page.
What is “Banner Blindness?”
You might have flashing icons for maps and weather. (Here’s the truth about banners: Visitors will unconsciously avert their eyes from anything flashing, or even a prominent, gaudy header.) Yeah, I know… I have a Bluehost affiliate banner that blinks, so I am a big hypocrite. Larger Adobe Flash items can sometimes be overbearing, and worse still, they can be bad for SEO if used incorrectly. (Flash can be ok, if you follow some rules. More about this at a later date.) In many cases, javascript players can be used instead of flash.
Widgets Schmidgets!
What about weather widgets? Do you really think that anyone will bookmark the site because there is a weather badge on it? They can just stick their heads out the window if they want to know what the weather is like. People want you to put mortgage calculators,weather gadgets, bogus web trophies, and devices of similar ilk to suck page rank from your site.
Branding, Anyone?
But what about all of the money you spent? Maybe you are into “branding” and have hired someone like Hobbs Herder to design a matching website, matching flyers, matching cards, matching curtains, and matching underwear. It’s sort of a “put-together” look. You spent thousands of dollars on it, too! Branding is a good thing, but will it really make people click on listings and call you? (Keep in mind that a large percentage of your site users will be from out of town, so your branding will not be so effective in these cases anyway.) You spent a lot of time and money dressing up your site, and you ask your friends and family to look at it. They say “Wow! That’s really cool!” Maybe that’s why we think our sites are so well-loved. Also, REALTORS® tend to have a mindset that says “If I am doing it, it must be good.” I’ve been there myself. That’s an example of REALTOR® egotism “gone to seed!” Not much real estate marketing is based on empirical data. Much of it is based on the needs of the ego.
Think about it for a minute… When you go to Target.com website, do you land on it and say “Wow! That’s really cool?” I doubt it. You just start shopping. If you pay attention to the way the site looks, you will see that it is rather simple.
Avoid Code with Tables
Some of the mass-produced sites like Z57 and Advanced Access will use tables. In these cases, it is a necessary evil because the sites are constructed so you can make pretty boxes and move them around or play with the presentation of the content. Unfortunately, table code is an anchor in the rear end of your site as far as SEO goes. Take a look at the source code, and search for anything like <tr> or <td> tags to see if your site has tables. If they are present, make sure that the actual content is loading first. Keep in mind that Google is looking for content, and it does not like chewing through tables to find information. If you need to show some kind of table, create it somewhere else, then take a screen shot and convert it to a jpg, gif, or png and make certain that there is a good alt tag to go with it.
Usability is King!
Visitors are only interested in one thing- usability! That means simple navigation to pages with useful information on products or services. They are looking for content and they want to find it easily. Everything else is just a distraction, as far as they are concerned. You can put all kinds of cool gimmicks on your website, but if they cannot access good hard information, they will hit the old “back” button faster than you say “goodbye.”
Usability studies have proven that visitors won’t back out of your site because it is the color of vomit. They won’t back out because it is a plain white page, either. I can’t give you verbatim or chapter and verse on this, but I read about it in a great book called “Don’t Make Me Think” by Steve Krug. If they can find what they are looking for, without having to make too many choices to get there, they simply won’t care about the appearance. Of course, you will want to hava a good-looking webste because it reflects on you (I guess!) I have a hunch that visitors will be more likely to do business because they can find what they are looking for. ( However, i bet that the idea that a cool looking website will make visitors choose you over someone else is an unproven assumption!) Yes, I know.. it can’t look too “home-baked” and it has to look professional. If you are a REALTOR® and you want to make a site that no other agents will like, try out a minimalist design. I guarantee you that the people in your office will think you are nuts! If you are brave enough to go down this path, there are some places where you can find minimalistic themes for your WordPress site:
1.) iA is a professionally designed and developed WordPress theme. It is very easy to read.
2.)Modicus Remix is a free, versatile WordPress theme.
3.) Plaintxt.org is militant about minimalism and has the best and most radical WordPress themes. I guarantee you that absolutely no one in the whole world will say “That’s cool!” Your fellow real estate agents will laugh at you. However, if you have a home search link somewhere near the top that is easy to spot, your visitors won’t mind it at all. Keep in mind that most people are looking at computer screens all day, and the last thing they want to see at the end of the day is an aggressive, visual multimedia assault from your real estate website.
Plaintxt.org operates on the premise that people want to actually read something when they use the internet. I think they might be right! When I run into a site with a minimalist theme, I find myself reading it intently.
I Need to Come to Terms with Reality
Do I think that I will be making many minimalist websites for real estate agents? I don’t think so. It is a very hard sell. I am not quite brave enough to go minimalist on my own website, although I have simplified it quite a bit. If you are a real estate agent and you want a site that is built for visibility and usability, please contact me.
Should You Use a Splash Page on My Real Estate Website?
The short answer is “no.” A longer answer is “absolutely not!” It will be “the kiss of death” for the SEO of your website. Fortunately, these are starting to fall out of favor.
REALTORS® Don’t Like This!
Here is a minimalistic blog that I use for testing things out. Most REALTORS won’t like it:
Ok, so go ahead and laugh!
After seeing this one, you might think I have lost my marbles.
No, it’s not my regular real estate website, so don’t get too worried about me. It is just for fun and experimenting. However, of all of the dozens of designs that I have used, this is the only one that has evoked unsolicited compliments from potential buyers because of the cleanliness and easy navigation. Someday I will have the guts to use something like this on my main site. My guess is that my bounce rate would go down and my conversion rate would go up.
What You Want Your Visitors to Do
1. Find your site on the internet.
2. Contact you, or find a house that they want to see, and then contact you.
3. Bookmark your site and come back. If your site works to meet the first two items of this list, they just might do so!
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- hobbs herder scam
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Nice, clean Design: A Real Estate website should a clean design and easy to use navigation so as to ensure that a site visitor finds the required information with minimum of clicks. The information should be presented quickly. Many sites have great animation and flash which do nothing to enlighten a visitor but only succeed in driving away a potential customer because they take forever to download. So the golden rule is to keep it SIMPLE.
I think the most important thing is the functionality , user friendly and provides your users what they are looking for then they will come back. Keep the site simple this is what I think..
A site should be simple for understanding of new visitors. This will generate more traffic also.
This post really made me laugh. It's easy to get carried away with a website, even though what is really important is doing the actual real estate.