On Real Estate Website Design
I’m currently working on a new theme for use in Real Estate. Building off of the experience I had with my last project in the industry, there are a few lessons I learned that I’m trying to apply directly to the new theme.
Its All About the Search!
Nearly 90% of site visitors go directly to the property search. Therefore, not only should the search be prominent, it should be the first thing they see, the last thing they see, and if you wanted to go really crazy, it could be the only thing they see, as they’re not likely to look for anything else. Well, except, of course for home valuation data. Zillow.com makes it quite clear what their site visitors are doing. According to them, if their visitors aren’t looking at listings, they’re looking at property valuation, something to bear in mind when trying to come up with ways to extend a visitor’s stay.
Keep the Word Count Down, and the Image Count Up
When displaying property listings, precious screen real estate should be dominated by pictures, with perhaps 10 words or less of supplemental text, and this includes the standard property stats
Extended property descriptions should be put off to a separate page dedicated to each listing. There are only a few key questions that most people are trying to get answered as they scan a large selection of listings.
- What does it look like?
- Does it have adequate facilities?
- What’s the asking price?
Most home shoppers do their research on multiple real estate sites. I’ve seen many sites laid out in such a way that they are nearly dominated by walls of text and superfluous home descriptions, in what I believe is a misguided attempt to improve SEO. SEO in my experience is about quality, not quantity.
Keep It Automated
Something I’ve learned from direct experience as well as anecdotally from other site-designers working the Real Estate market. Asking your average agent and site owner to create a blog post can be challenging, depending on their inspiration and dedication to the task. Asking them to manually create resized thumbnail images, then enter the URLs in 3 different fields, or using more than 4 or 5 custom fields in general, to where creating a blog post resembles a multiple choice quiz for computer enthusiasts, is not going to help keep your agent productive on the site, improving their SEO, site traffic, and potential for online success. Image dispersal needs to be completely automated, as should excerpt creation, seo fields, anything and everything that can be done automagically will improve your site users productivity, helping the site achieve maximum potential, and making you look like a superstar!
A Final Word and a Link to the Work-In-Progess
I’m also trying to build this theme to be more modular, to allow for changing design trends, as well as to allow me to use the site as more of a framework, knowing that reusable code is the greatest gift a developer can give themselves. The most challenging part of this, to me, is not making it LOOK modular, but more… organically designed. Perhaps this is where I’ll show my greatest strengths, or weaknesses, in both development and design. But, I suppose its good to have ideals to strive for.
For now, I’m hosting my test copy at realestatic.tarpontech.biz. I’m using it as a blank canvas, so it is, and will be, rather bland. Real Estatic is being developed primarily to work with the WordPress real estate plugin WP-REALTY, as its the best software package I’ve found for importing MLS listing data into a WordPress site. In my experience, agents don’t simply want to display their listings, they want to be THE destination site for their clientele, and this requires a full-featured property search based on the local region’s MLS. Sites that don’t offer a complete regional property search are without question the exception, not the rule.
