Tips for the Best Real Estate Website Design
What makes a good website? Depending on what industry you’re in, or your preferences, that answer may be a little different from person to person. There are a few key factors that make up a good website, but depending on the experience the owner is trying to give the audience, it’s never quite the same. With that said, today we’re going to focus on some of the elements that go into a good real estate website design.
As you might expect, a real estate website is a very specific niche. Yes, there are lots of different houses displaying different styles, but the goal of the website is very specific: sell houses. So what exactly goes into real estate website design? Let’s dive a little deeper:
Beautiful images
It is incredibly hard to sell a product online with terrible pictures. If the customer can’t get a good sense of what the house looks like from a computer screen, they may get the wrong impression, and lookover a house completely. High-quality, detailed images are absolutely vital to the overall design of the website.
You should try to provide the best images possible for the listings, yes, but that theme should carry throughout the entire website. Don’t cut any corners.
Let your images do the talking
You know that phrase, “A picture is worth a thousand words”? That phrase rings incredibly true in the real estate business. Working off of our last point, if you have high-quality images of beautiful homes, you can easily implement them into the main theme of the overall sight.
Remember, people are visiting these websites for one thing and one thing only: to look at beautiful houses. What better way to please them than to give them what they want, front and center?
Take a look at Piercommercial.com, for example. It’s a simple, clean design that isn’t overwhelmed by tabs and sidebars. They’ve provided all the necessary information you need as a potential buyer, and topped it off with a nice image.
Include client testimonials
Granted, this is a great idea for any website selling a product or service, but you can understand why. Testimonials are a great way to include custom content that no other website can obtain. Each customer served or home sold produces a unique, one-of-a-kind experience that just simply can’t be duplicated naturally.
Besides that, a real estate website is all about pulling in traffic, and converting them to customers. The absolute best way to do that is to include past experiences that resulted in a happy customer. You can huff and puff all day long about how awesome you are at selling houses, but the average customer will believe another satisfied customer over you 9 times out of 10.
All of that being said, you’ll want to include images that represent the market you’re in. It doesn’t make much sense for a commercial real estate agent to use images of a country cottage. Perhaps the best practice would be to use images of homes or buildings that you’ve sold in the past.
Make it mobile friendly
It kind of goes without saying at this point that any website design should be created with mobile users in mind. In this case, we’re talking about real estate website design, which means that you’ll have clients out and about, going house to house as they find them.They’ll need a quick way to look up some information about the house that they very well could be standing right in front of.
As time goes on, the need for more mobile friendly websites will increase to a point where it will pretty much be unavoidable. So, if your website isn’t already created with mobile users in mind, you have homework to do.
Keep the navigation simple
There’s no need to get fancy with the navigation in your real estate website design. The best practice in this case would be to be straightforward. Again, this is something that a lot of websites struggle with. While it is appropriate to be a little silly or playful on some websites, a real estate page should be simple and professional.
I know, I know, professional can be boring, but it will help you in the end. You have to remember what kind of an audience you’re reeling in. most of the time, you’ll have people that want to get in, find what they’re looking for, and get out. Make it simple and straightforward, and it’ll avoid any potential confusion.
Focus on speed
Real estate websites contain a lot of information. This, of course, can result in very slow loading times, which isn’t a good thing. In fact, if your website loads slowly, not only will potential, high-paying clients leave, Google will, too. With that said, you should take every chance you get to improve loading speeds.
There are a few ways to help your site load faster, but perhaps the best and most widely used method is condensing image files. For a website with loads of images, it’s pretty important that all of their file sizes are as small as they can be without compromising the quality of the image itself. There are lots of free softwares that will help you do this online.
Create area profiles
Most people, when searching for their new home, know exactly the area they want to live in. if you create an area profile, it will help you in two ways:
First, it will really speed up the search process that everyone goes through when looking for a home. They don’t want to look at every house available in the state, or even city. They want to look neighborhood by neighborhood.
Second, it really helps with SEO search results. When someone is looking for a house in a specific neighborhood, they type ,”Homes for sale” and then the name of the neighborhood. If you’ve created a profile dedicated to such neighborhood, you’ll rank for it. It’s a win-win.
The conclusion
Real estate website design isn’t any sort of new industry or practice. It’s been around for quite a while, actually, but it does change. Although there are plenty of experimental methods out there (as there are for just about everything), there are methods that remain true to success. If you’re struggling with your real estate website design, or maybe just looking for ways to improve on it, give these tips a shot.
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