REALTOR Magazine recently published an article titled “30 Under 30″. As the summary states:
“Markets may be churning, but if these dynamic practitioners are any indication, opportunity is still knocking. Although they’re under 30, they demonstrate grit, resilience, and sheer love of the game. These bright young professionals, chosen from more than 600 applicants, showed they have what it takes to open doors in any market.”
Having never personally met any of these people, I won’t even begin to discuss their skills or personalities. Instead, I’ll talk about what I do know very well, and that is web design.
Several others have given brief summaries of primary judgment for each person on the list. I’m going to give my overall impressions.
- Either ugly and too much information or “pretty” with hidden information.
- Most of the sites are just ugly. Those are also the ones with far too many links available to site visitors. It’s called “information overload” and it is in full swing with Realtor web sites. Too many links is a very common problem amongst Realtor web sites. Do you really need a mortgage calculator? A Google search for “mortgage calculator” returns about 6,340,000 results. You don’t really need that information. Links should include: “About Me/Us”, “Current Listings”, “Previous Listings”, “Testimonials” and “FAQ”. You should be able to sum up all of the information your customers need with those categories.
- Company provided sites.
- These are terrible and you have little to no control. I teach classes about Search Engine Optimization, and I let everyone know that if they have a company provided site, they might as well leave. If you are one of the top 30 Realtors under 30 in the US, you should be able to afford a real web site.
- Registration.
- I don’t want to give you all of my personal information just to search your site. I will waste your time by inputting fake information. Give me all of your information for free and unrestricted and I will reward you with my business.
- Cross-browser testing.
- Firefox now has over 10% of the internet browser market share. Some of these sites were obviously designed only with Microsoft Internet Explorer in mind, which is fine because they have the other 85%+ of the market. Do you really want to send away 10% of the people who visit your site?
- Unique information.
- I can get all of the information on most of these web sites from a thousand different sources. None of these sites do a thing to make me want to come back and get valuable, timely information from their site.
When I was working as a professional web designer/marketer, I would always point out to my clients that if your site does nothing to bring people back, it will not make you money. Combining a lack of aesthetics with an overload of worthless information WILL NOT create return visitors which makes your site worthless.
It’s a Catch-22 situation in that to have a good site in all regards will cost you more money than what you’re spending now. But that investment will help to grow your business. Especially in the eyes of the current “slowdown” in the market, most business people are attempting to slash expenses. In the case of a business web site, you either need to go all out or not at all. A poorly designed, ineffective site will only frustrate you since it will bring you no business and do little to define you.
If you need help or want recommendations on your site or a referral to a competent web design/marketing team, please contact me.
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