I believe that the Internet is the furture. I would like to make this my area of expertise, even though I am not an expert. I would like to share some helpful information to all agents and to inform the buyers and sellers what we do to give their home full exposure.
One of the ways we give our sellers full exposure is our website design and the optimizing that we do on a daily basis.
Good Web Design:
Too often, Real Estate companies and their Web Designers work too hard to make their site “different” by taking approaches which are ego-driven, or artistically driven, rather than user driven. The end result is a web site that frustrates its users, and underperforms.
To avoid this, you need to take a very cold, hard look at your site from an “outsider” perspective, and if possible, get other people to review your site and provide honest feedback. To be “different”, you should have a better experience for site visitors, with a wealth of content, tools and listings, not an odd font, strange color scheme, or unexpected menu locations.
To evaluate the effectiveness of your site’s design, please review our Web Design Checklist
Elements of Good Web Design
- Make Important Things Prominent – Use Clear Visual Hierarchies
- Make it Obvious What’s Clickable and Usable
- Be Consistent
- Optimize for Screen Size
- Be Aware of the Fold
Make Important Things Prominent – Use Clear Visual Hierarchies
This simply means that if something is important to the user, it should ideally be:
Placed near the top of the page – People in all cultures read pages top to bottom
Placed on the left side of the page – In North America, people read from left to right
Be larger than other page elements – “Bigger” automatically means “important” to users
Have more visual emphasis than other page elements – paragraph headers, bolds, italics
A good example of this in action is on the gmacrealestate.com site. The link for “BUY A HOME” is on the top and the left. It is clearly one of the most important pages on the site. As you go from Left to right, the menu items are:
BUY A HOME
SELL YOUR HOME
FIND AN OFFICE / AGENT
LEARN ABOUT REAL ESTATE
CAREERS IN REAL ESTATE
ABOUT US
“About Us” is on the right side of the page – one of the last things that a user will notice, if they ever notice it at all.
On the bottom of the same page, and every page are other links, such as
Terms of Use
Privacy
Technical Considerations
Agent Intranet
These links are of much less importance to home buyers and sellers, and are thus at the bottom of the page, are not in ALL CAPS, and are in a much smaller font.
This makes sense – and most sites follow these rules to a degree, but it is surprising how many sites give relatively unimportant features the top spot on their menu, while burying “Home Search” or “Find an Agent” in the middle. Other sites sometimes don’t include these all important pages on their menus at all.
function showpop() { alert(" When you clicked on the underlined and differently colored clickability link, you naturally expected a reaction. So will users of your site.") }
Make it Obvious What’s Clickable and Usable
On the internet, the underlined word has a special significance that it doesn’t possess offline. Online, underlining is an indicator of clickability. This came about in the early days of the internet, and it has not changed.
Therefore, rather than try to fight this and decide that to be different “on my site, clickable links are going to be bold”, please follow the convention of underlining. The more you diverge from standard web design, the harder your site will be to use, and less satisfying for the user.
If you have “buttons” that can be clicked, or fields to be filled in, it’s a good idea to use a minor amount of shading to give the illusion of depth onscreen. Remember, people have visual expectations, and buttons that seem to “stick up”, and fields that can be “filled in” encourage user interaction.
Be Consistent
This means that you should be consistent in your page layouts. Users dislike having to change the way they use a site after they’ve left the main page.
If your menu is on the top of the page, it should stay on the top on all pages of your site. If the center of the page contains content, it should always contain content. If your links are blue and underlined on one page, they can’t be red and bold on another, and so on.
Again, this makes perfect sense, but it is surprising how often you find sites that don’t have a consistent feel. That lack of consistency creates an impression in the mind of the site visitor as to the nature of the company owning the site.
One area where you need to make decisions about consistency is in the integration of MLS feeds into your site. If you use the local MLS site for listings, rather than populating the listings within your own site’s format, you should try to subtly integrate the look and feel of your own site with that of the MLS site as much as possible. If the MLS site is terribly designed, then you may have no choice but to have some “disruption” between your site and the listings.
Optimize for Screen Size
Screen resolution has changed dramatically in the last several years, enabling larger and “roomier” websites. Standard Web screen sizes are now 1024x768 pixels wide – almost twice the standard size in 2000. When you design your site, you should optimize layout for this size, while being aware that at least 10% of users still use smaller screen sizes.
For those users you should work with your designer to design a “liquid layout”, which automatically adjust its presentation to the users screen size, or do as some companies have done and devote the “right rail” to supplementary information that large screen users can see, but small screen users can do without.
Be Aware of the Fold
The bottom of the screen is often the beginning of “no man’s land” on the internet. Research shows that most users will not scroll down to view Search Results, and visitors to other web sites follow similar patterns, with dramatically fewer clicks and views of elements that appear “below the fold” on any page.
For this reason, you should be certain to ensure your entire navigation menu is visible above the fold, and keep key content and lead capture mechanisms where a user can see them without scrolling.
One pages with a great deal of content, it is expected that the user will scroll down to view listings, articles and other information, but some designers tend to break long sections of content into shorter pages, with the user clicking “next” at the bottom of the page, rather than forcing the user to scroll.
I hope this was helpful and If anyone has some information to share regarding web design or optimization please e-mail me at kwynn@appleseedhomes.com
Kathy Wynn
