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!

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 including 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.

A 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.

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While presenting at Howard Brinton’s Star Power 2007 the last week in July, we had no less than 50 people approach us with some version of the same question: "Are hits an accurate reflection of my traffic?"

One might argue traffic is traffic and it depends on what one considers a return for their investment of time, effort & money. In our view site metrics and business metrics are different and site metrics do NOT necessarily translate to the bottom line. Generally our answer is, “Unless visitation numbers solely reflect humans, the traffic isn’t potential leads, listings or sales.”

It’s relevant to explain that using the word hit as a synonym for traffic can easily exaggerate the numbers with 1) non- human bot traffic or by 2) the fact that a single web-page typically consists of multiple (often dozens) files. In this case, each file gets counted as a hit as the page is downloaded making the number of hits more reflective of complex website pages than actual traffic. In the first scenario, bot [crawler or spider] traffic is typically a lot more than, if not the majority of, total visitor traffic.

It’s also important to add that Google Yahoo, MSN, AOL, etc. bot [crawler or spider] visitation is very important to a website or Blog owner; however, millions of other bots continuously crawl the web and many have different, sometimes less than valuable or even nefarious, intentions. For those not familiar, the Google bot is software deployed to collect documents from the web in order to build a search-able index for their search engine. Without a visit from the Google bot, one cannot be indexed or, as a result, show up in Google search results. In fact Real Estate Blogsites™, who market, sell, service and provide two forms of traffic analytic & performance tracking. One strictly tracks Google bot & Google [human] search activity, while the other [VisiStat who we proudly endorse], which not only offers incredibly rich traffic data and an undeniably layperson- friendly dashboard, strictly tracks human visitation.

While it may be more impressive for a Realtor to share hit numbers to a listing prospect, an alternative strategy might be to educate prospects on both sets of data… leaving the competition to deal with an informed homeowner. In summary, websites and blogs are marketing solutions and we feel that folks should be clear on their business metrics and what actual return there is for their investment of time, effort & money.