By Jim Somers
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Developing an effective real estate website, however, isn't as easy as taking a few photos and uploading them to a template. Because we've been designing websites for over 11 years, we've seen - and heard - it all.
What follows are five Do's and Don'ts to keep in mind when developing a website that promotes your real estate services.
It's easy to fall for those "all in one" packages offered by hosting companies. Basically, the company hosts your site and in return you have access to their free "easy-to-use" website templates and other web design tools.
The reality is you either spend hours (or days or weeks) trying to figure out how to use the design tools, or your "do it yourself" (DIY) site comes out looking really ugly, or both.
Like a retail storefront, your website is the first impression people have of you. A poorly designed site says volumes about you and your business - and can result in fewer phone calls and emails.
A DIY site can also end up costing you big dollars. A real estate agent in another state, for example, called us about replacing an existing site. Well, he had put together the existing site using his hosting company's content management system (CMS) - which was fine when he started out five years ago.
Now that his company had grown, he wanted a customized site that better communicated his services and expertise.
The problem? The hosting company's CMS didn't allow people to customize their sites. Compounding the problem was the amount of content this agent had generated in five years. Extracting it from the CMS proved to be labor intensive and cost a lot of money.
Whether you have a limited budget or no budget, you can afford a website. The trick is to understand what's available and what fits your budget. When it comes to website design, you have a few options:
Outsource to a trusted design firm - Although it can be a relatively expensive option upfront, paying a firm to design your site saves you money in the long run. You're assured of getting a professionally designed site that adheres to standard design principles, that can grow with you as your business grows, and that helps convert site visitors into real leads.
Have a designer customize a template - Although pre-made templates are a cost-effective way to get a site up and running, their drawback is that you still need to know HTML in order to customize the template for your purposes. If you're on a budget, ask your designer if he/she will customize an existing template. He or she will be able to advise you if the underlying code (or content management system) is suitable for your purposes. And, your designer can get your site up and running in a fraction of the time it would take you to do it - freeing you up to pursue more lucrative real estate deals.
Start with a "mini-site" - For those of you on a very limited budget, consider starting out with a simple three-page site that explains your services and how people can contact you. As your business and budget grow, you can then add additional content.
When you hire a firm to design or host your site, make sure your domain name (i.e. www.yourcompanyname.com) is registered in your name. Time and again we've had clients ask us to move their website from one hosting company to another - at which point we, and they, learn the former hosting company owns the domain name.
We routinely receive pretty scary images - floor plans that look like 20th generation photocopies and low-resolution digital photographs that look like anything but a room in a house. Clients assume we can just "photoshop" images to make them look better. The short answer is, most of the time we can't.
And, as we tell our real estate clients, if you're selling a $500K property, you want more than fuzzy photographs you tried to crop and enhance yourself.
In addition to using high-quality images, you'll also want to ensure your designer optimizes large images for quick loading. Nothing causes people to click the browser "Back" button faster than a slow-loading website.
If you're selling a property or properties, remember to add promotions or incentives to your site that get people to call or email for more information. For example, offer potential buyers a Starbucks coffee card for scheduling a tour.
If your budget allows, incorporate new technologies, such as virtual tours. You can pay a professional to produce a video tour, complete with music or voice over. Or, you can take advantage of new software that allows site visitors to view rooms with 360 degrees of rotation simply by running the mouse over a photograph.
Whether you're a company of one or many, developing a website that helps people decide to do business with you is one of your more important marketing decisions. Allocating funds for a professionally designed site will save you money in the long run and help increase the number of calls and emails you get -- which in turn leads to more closed deals.
Jim Somers is the President of Sonora DesignWorks, an Amesbury, MA firm that specializes in real estate marketing and web design. Jim can be contact by phone at 978-388-1716 or via the firm's website at http://www.sonoradesignworks.com.
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