Better Site Design For Agent & Broker Impact!

By frerecks • January 23rd, 2012

Site design is subjective and every agent has their own opinion, likes & dislikes. What’s important to consider is… most home buyers & sellers have a very limited attention span on the web. If you think about your own behavior when looking for information, do you move around quickly until you see something you want?

To help think design through, here are some steps we’d advocate to support better impact and lead conversion with your site’s home page design!

Better Home Page Design

Successful Site Design

1. Define Your Purpose Succinctly: find the discipline to define who you are and what you do up top and in as simple a manner as is possible.

The Mortgage Centre Toronto is not only the logo, but incredibly succinct and easy to understand. Adding the region of emphasis – ‘Servicing The Greater Toronto Area’ – certainly supports.

2. Emphasize ‘Call To Action’: give visitors an obvious and immediate means to get what they want.

The Mortgage Centre Toronto and Corvallis Oregon Agent Annette Sievert want visitors to get what they came for Better Home Page Designincluding options to search homes; to access to great deals; to ask questions and to communicate now!

3. Offer Clear Menu Navigation: give the visitor a means to drill down into your content without having it clutter the home page design.

We’re suggesting items for emphasis in this post, but your site will likely offer a lot more … so develop a top-level menu of tabs that are simple to understand & navigate. Allow visitors to drill down easily, yet the home page doesn’t have to be an overwhelming experience.

4. Demonstrate You Are Current: it is good practice to demonstrate you are both current & knowledgeable in your profession and you can do it with your site’s blog.

However, there’s no reason your entire home page has to be blog copy; certainly not when you’re trying to achieve all of the above [and below]. Consider designing a summary of what exists on your site’s blog, with a few recent post titles all linking into the greater depth of information you have there.

It’s also worth mentioning, you do want some recognition of new copy on your home page. It supports more visitor page views and also deeper search engine crawling!

5. Offer Reasons To Register & Subscribe: most visitors want to be in control of their experience on your site, so allow it; however, there’s no reason you can’t offer some improved value in exchange for a registration.

better home page designA number of real estate agents offer unlimited free home search because, frankly, visitors expect it AND the competition is doing it too. Beyond free search, the opportunity to register for email when similar listings arrive on the market is a pretty standard lead capture solution with most IDX Search accounts. Other options that might enhance an individuals search experience include a personal account profile, saved search criteria and also specific saved listings?  How about FREE UPDATES via email where there’s some good local blogging going on? In either case, find conspicuous but not obnoxious ways to promote these added value registration options.

6. Try And Keep It Above The Fold: and we repeat, “most home buyers & sellers have a very limited attention span on the web!”

People have different screen sizes, screen resolutions, browsers, versions of browser, security configurations and ‘who knows what else’ influencing their view, so do your best to keep what’s important above the fold! Don’t worry about all that depth of content you have, if you designed well visitors should be able to navigate their way to it all easily enough.

Related Posts: 

WHAT IS YOUR GOAL WITH SITE DEVELOPMENT AND DESIGN?

BUILDING GREAT BUSINESS SITES THAT FOCUS ON CLIENT GOALS!

Contributed by
chris@kineticknowledge.com


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Comments(2) WEB TRAFFIC

Comments

By Alex Horowitz on February 23rd, 2012 at 4:35 am

Intelligent and well-thought out web design is extremely important, especially for a real estate agent. There are several in Brea real estate that have great sites, with separated categories for both buyers and sellers, and you can easily get the results of your queries. You can also find a number of loans that you can choose from if you’re thinking of applying for one. It really shows how important the design of a website is when it comes to customer satisfaction. If the site doesn’t have the information that the visitors need or want, they will most likely look for another website to search in. If it’s not well laid out and have fast loading times it will not only have a higher bounce rate of visitors, but it will also display a bad image of the broker/agent and take away from their legitimacy and reputation.

By frerecks on February 23rd, 2012 at 10:25 am

Yep ;-) Thanks for your comments Alex.

 

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