real estate web design Archives -

Own Your Website… Own Your Content… Own Your Marketing

November 14, 2014 By Cole Wiebe 1 Comment

Real estate web development, Vancouver, BC

Are you trying to “sell”, while still “renting”?

I was in a meeting with a real estate professional a few days ago, and asked her if she owned or rented her home. She shot back a startled reply, “Are you kidding me? It would be tantamount to blasphemy for an agent to rent their home. How could I “sell” real estate when I didn’t believe in “ownership.” Good point. She went on to tell me that people who rent are just throwing their money away… They aren’t building any equity…

Next I asked her if she paid a monthly fee to have her website. She replied in the affirmative. I asked her what would happen if she stopped making those monthly payments. She told me the website would disappear from the internet within weeks, along with the content. I then posed the question, “Are you renting, or do you own your website, your content and your marketing?” “Oh my gosh,” she responded, “I’m a tenant.”

Any reputable agent will encourage their clients to “buy in” with an investment that builds equity and offers the potential for a return over the years to come.

Many real estate agents start out with one of those cookie cutter, template websites, auto-generated by a computer. They sign up to the forty or fifty bucks a month plan, pick the template they like best, upload a logo and photo, and hastily type in some text into a few pages. Often, the content is “piped in” to their WWW domain from the remote provider’s server. That means there’s no “real content” actually residing there. (This protects the interests of the website provider because they can kill the site by remote if the monthly rental payment doesn’t clear.)

There’s usually no marketing strategy beyond having something come up when visitors type in www.mycoolrealestatesite.com. The agent signed up for a site, and now they’re waiting for the flood of leads to come in. The providers will tell their customers their sites are “SEO friendly”, but in truth, websites don’t market themselves. So the site fails in gaining search engine rankings, building much traffic or generating any leads.

Often, if the first site doesn’t produce results, they’ll buy a second, or even a third. Hell, they’re so cheap! It’s the battle of the Clone Wars… “You have two sites in our neighbourhood… I’ll raise you to three.”

Here’s the problem: Minimal investment, minimal return! If one ineffective site doesn’t get the job done, neither will two or three.

The “cheap rental” website may have been a “quick and easy” place to start out, but one day it’s time to actually buy in to their career and marketing, and put on a pair of “big boy pants”. They need to start taking their online marketing very seriously and build some online equity. As any real estate pro advises their clients, when you rent you’re just throwing your money away, and it’s finally time to own.

Final thoughts

If that’s where you find yourself today, you need to own your website, own your content and own your marketing. If it’s your content, it should physically reside on your server space. And to drive traffic and leads, you will need a content strategy that includes SEO (search engine optimization), ongoing content creation and publishing, and social media… every month.

Should You Require Registration for Viewing IDX?

November 2, 2014 By Cole Wiebe Leave a Comment

should-you-require-registration-to-view-idx-listings

This is a controversial topic, with real estate conversion professionals and agents often on opposite sides of the “gate.” I’ll explore both arguments briefly…

CON: IDX (MLS Reciprocity) listings should be public

Most real estate agents I’ve spoken with believe that since IDX listings appear on almost every agent website, they should be public. Their feelings are that requiring registration will reduce engagement, and the visitors will find what they need on another site.

They have a valid point; most sites display the very same IDX data. I was doing some competitive marketing research yesterday for a client, and came across the very same IDX (MLS Reciprocity in B.C.) results on a few sites in a row. For the neighbourhood I was searching, the same 56 results were showing up, with the identical home displayed at the top of the list. That piqued my curiosity and I eventually discovered 27 sites with identical IDX results, and only 2 with unique curated results and layouts.

PRO: Registration should be required before IDX listings are displayed

1. People want to have access to insider information. It makes them feel privileged. Presented well, engagement can actually increase significantly with a registration requirement.

If you decide to require registration, and login for subsequent visits, use a landing page to sell the visitor on the merits of signing up, with a form for doing so. Hire a conversion copywriter that specializes in landing pages, if needed.

Then follow up with substantially better information than the average real estate site in your area is offering. We work with third party IDX providers that curate the data from various real estate boards, and it is indeed possible to build a better user experience that makes the member happy they exchanged their name and email address for the the upgrade. Ethical bribes are good marketing.

And, it goes without saying, once you have their details, keep the valuable content coming.

2. It addresses “search, scribble and drive” visitors. If you are already doing everything right…

Creating ridiculously valuable content on a very consistent basis
promoting it in social channels,
building your list of subscribers,
actively engaging with prospects online,
sending out valuable content by email,
optimizing your website and marketing funnel every month…

you should have a flood of quality traffic and subscribers.

If your IDX provider delivers analytics data, you should see evidence of considerable interaction with your IDX search bar widget or MLS pages.

So where are the #$&^%#!! leads?

With so many sites offering the same MLS information, if the searchers decide to actually pull the trigger and contact an agent online, which one they decide on tends to be a crap shoot.
Many visitors “search, scribble and drive.” They search the MLS, scribble down a few addresses and go for a drive. If they decide to call an agent for a showing, guess which number they dial? The one in front of them. It’s either on the sign on the lawn or the sheet they picked up.

Final thoughts

Bottom line: if your visitors are scrolling through your IDX listings, but they aren’t contacting you, you’ve got nothing! If that’s currently happening to you, giving gated access a try can’t hurt. It’s all about leveraging your traffic, their need for feeling valued and special, and desire for the very best local listing data at their finger tips.

If you got a name and email address from them, you can check your IDX analytics to see what they were looking at, based upon time stamps, and offer to show one of those properties to them. Worst case, they’re on your list, so you are able to influence them with your helpful email updates.

If you decide to give it a go, conduct an accurate A/B test. Make sure you have all of the data you need for the last complete month, then get systems in place for registered IDX access, with a proper landing page for signups and a better user experience.

I welcome your questions and comments below. Have you tried gated access to IDX results? How did it affect visitor engagement? Do you have some reservations?

Are you wondering if you may benefit from some one-on-one help? A free 20 minute coaching call may be a game changer.

Designing an Effective Real Estate Website

October 3, 2014 By Cole Wiebe Leave a Comment

A site designed to give you, the owner, exactly what you wanted may actually be the single greatest obstacle standing in the way of rankings, traffic and leads.

Even a drop-dead gorgeous award-winning website may not be a good design.

What is good design? For the real estate professional, the website must increase sales, not overhead.

Massimo Vignelli often said, “Design is not art. Art does not have to be functional.”

An attractive website can potentially increase page views, lower the bounce rate and enhance the number of earned links to its pages. But is a beautiful site necessary to perform well on the bottom line? Sadly, that would be a no. Four of the ugliest websites have made millions: Facebook, Google, Plenty of Fish and Craigslist.

So what makes a website design good?

It all begins with great content. The design then focuses on presenting your extremely valuable content in its best light. Most sites have it backwards. They design a new site and then replace the “Lorem Ipsum” filler text with hastily-written copy.

Value is perceived in under 3 seconds. Visitors should know within 3 seconds if they’ve arrived at a site that is likely to answer their question or have what they are looking for.

It differentiates you from the ambient noise. Your USP (unique selling proposition) should be plainly visible. All other factors being equal, you will succeed to the degree you contrast yourself from the herd.

If you look like the competition, and sound like the competition, there’s no reason to choose you over the competition.

– Ben Hunt

It connects you with your audience. Your visitors aren’t going to contact you because your IDX widget is cooler, or the design is sexier. They have to like you, trust you and genuinely believe you can help them. Your content must convince them of that.

It takes visitors where they need to go. Calls to action on the home page should grab visitors by the hand and lead them to the content they need by the shortest possible route. No desired page should be more than 3 clicks away.

The visitor doesn’t have to think or work. Where there’s a lot of content, consider using accordion or overlay panels to reveal additional information, so visitors don’t have to click to other pages.

There’s something for all three types of visitors. For search-oriented users, make the search field is prominently displayed. For menu-driven visitors, be sure the menu is easy to use, and choose only the most common menu terms rather than trying to be cute. For lazy users that want content to come to them, a video on the home page can tell your story without clicking a thing.

The pages are fast loading. Good websites avoid resource-hogging JavaScript features and huge images. Consider using CSS3 instead of buttons, box shadows, border radii, gradients, animated transitions and transformations, etc. You will beat your competitors by providing better content; not more gimmicky features and larger, slow-loading images.

Your content has killer titles. A great title will lead visitors to read your page or post. Titles also improve rankings and increase click-throughs from search engine results.

A photo is worth a thousand words. Choose images that not only support your content, but also intrigue your audience. Remember that Google can’t “see” your photos. Make sure you optimize your image file names, titles and ALT tags.

Take it easy on hi-res images. Not everyone has retina displays. Serving up enormous image files to people that can’t enjoy them unnecessarily increases load times.

Interaction and sharing are encouraged. A successful website encourages commenting and sharing of content. Some of the “evergreen” (will still be relevant and useful a few years from now) content has a high value and this encourages links from other sites.

There’s a proven conversion strategy. Behind it all, there’s a solid plan that pulls visitors into the sales funnel, onto the mailing list and gets them registered in your CRM for future lead nurturing.

Final thoughts

Good web design is so much more than looking pretty. I welcome your comments. If you would like my feedback on your real estate website, please schedule a free 20 minute coaching session.

Disappointing Rankings, Traffic, Results… Is Your Website Broken?

September 16, 2013 By Cole Wiebe 27 Comments

Real estate webmaster services, Vancouver, BC

We check a new post after launch and it looks good… so we just assume the site’s working perfectly. But is that a careless assumption?

It has been said that assumption is the mother of all f$%!-ups. It can be dangerous to assume that all is well. In fact, unsatisfactory performance in search engine rankings, traffic analytics and responses/conversions can often be traced back to a site that’s broken.

Over the past sixteen years as a web developer and webmaster I’ve seen a lot of things that have broken websites. Here are a few of the classics from the hall of shame…

Broken links

Sometimes the URL in a link was poorly formed in the first place and never tested. You of course always test every link when a page or post goes live, right?

An internal page or post may have been renamed or deleted, leaving internal broken links. Websites you linked to may have removed content, completed a redesign with a new platform, or disappeared entirely, resulting in broken external links.

Not only do broken links make for a poor user experience; it’s one of the factors Google’s algorithm considers when ranking websites. If you’re not checking your website regularly for broken links, there’s no time like the present to adopt the practice.

Online tools like Broken Link Checker make it easy, and free. On the Mac, I like to use the Integrity app. For PC’s there’s Xenu’s Link Sleuth. There’s also a WordPress plugin I like that monitors your site’s blog for broken links continuously: Broken Link Checker, with a list of any broken links detected in the Dashboard.

Broken menus

On CMS websites like WordPress and Joomla! installations, I’ve come across entire menus that suddenly broke. Yikes! Not one link or button worked. The web developer gets the blame for these, of course, but the cause has always been traced to the renaming of categories, thus far, where the permalink includes the category alias. Unfortunately, the clients never considered the impact coming up with “better” names for things would have on the internal links, so there have been weeks following the updates where sites were completely unusable. A sharp drop in search engine rankings, or an email to the owner that their site was majorly screwed, were the first indicator that anything was wrong. In some cases, only one menu link will go bad, usually the result of altering the alias for a page or post, or removing content.

If you’re a tinkerer, you should be clicking through your menus routinely. Note that many websites use JavaScript menus, and a few still have Flash menus, in which case broken menus will not show up in a broken link check.

Broken images and other content

One of the common causes for missing images is doing a bit of housecleaning in the WordPress or Joomla! media folder, and weeding out one too many files. Oops! This should be a very easy fix. If you right-click on the broken image icon in the web page, and check the info for the URL, you should get the filename and FTP directory it disappeared from. Your last backup should have the missing file. You do make regular backups of your root directory and take MySQL dumps, or click the backup button in the control panel your host provides, right? We like Backup Buddy in WordPress to automatically make backups of the database and files about once a week.

Here’s one most people don’t think of. Many hosting companies haven’t switched to solid state (SSD) drives yet. That means hard drive platters spin nearly constantly and it’s only a matter of time before the one your files are on fails. In an ideal world, a RAID mirror backup drive is immediately swapped in within a microsecond. Many hosting companies don’t use redundant systems and instead have their hard drives backup during a slow period at night or, as we have discovered through hard experience, they may actually back up only weekly.

I recommend backing up on the server, but also having full recent backups on your own computer at all times. Eleven years ago we worked with a local hosting company that assured me that not being able to backup the MySQL databases with phpMyAdmin was not a problem. They had full backups on two servers and would be able to restore the sites within fifteen minutes if there was ever a problem. That worked just fine right until they went bankrupt, the servers were seized, and both the site files and backups for eight clients vanished. I lost tens of thousands on that episode, making it up to the clients, and still blush when I think of it.

Hard drive backups are not infallible and sometimes the most recent backup is actually corrupt. In severe data loss cases, your site won’t load and all visitors will see is an error message. More frequently, you’ll only discover missing images and other media days or weeks later. Some plugins may not work. Text may be garbled with weird symbols. Random weird stuff. In other cases, the company notices there are issues with the replacement drive and goes with an earlier backup. This can be serious if the content is time sensitive. For example, we built and maintained an online grocery store site that updated almost every day with new pricing and specials. To revert to a backup of eight days earlier caused some very costly issues in their ecommerce store, before we detected the problem and restored from our own backup, and we’ve learned to choose hosting companies more carefully for time sensitive applications like that.

Three times over the past decade another gremlin has wiped out database-driven CMS sites: timeouts during edit uploads. If you’re making live edits to your WordPress, Joomla!, Drupal or other CMS site, a slow connection or server timeout during high traffic can not only cause the edit to fail, it can damage the MySQL database file. A few characters that don’t transfer, are altered, or go missing is all it takes. With a corrupt database, nothing loads. Always test your edits in a browser, after refreshing your content, before walking away from the computer. Never assume that it looks great and that the changes took place without any glitches.

Software issues may have broken your site

When WordPress or Joomla! asks you to make sure your site is fully backed up before you update the core software or extensions, please do as they recommend.

We’ve had updates fail completely, taking the site down within seconds. In other cases, only part of the site was damaged during a version update and we didn’t know about it for days or weeks. Plugins and other extensions that once played nice together may have serious conflicts after an update.

Adding or removing an extension (plugins, modules and components, depending on the CMS) can cause problems. Do a quick check of the site any time you make a change. A few weeks ago, I discovered to my horror that the comments on my site had vanished… all of them. I began to backtrack in my mind and the only change I could think of was the installation of CommentLuv Premium. On a hunch, I deactivated it and instantly my comments returned. Very disappointed over loosing the benefits offered by the plugin, I tried reactivating it in WordPress. This time my comments were visible again. Just one of those funky things that happens sometimes when extending the functionality of a CMS website. Unfortunately, I went over a week without comments enabled because I failed to check everything immediately after making a change.

The ‘white screen of death’ is a common malady in WordPress. After updating plugins, suddenly all that shows in the browser is the infamous arctic whiteout scene. Failure to check your site after updating plugins could leave your visitors without a visible website for days or even weeks.

And then there’s caching. Caching plugins can dramatically improve the page load speeds of a website, but they can cause the owner a lot of grief as well. If you use a caching solution that requires manual clearing of the cache, the changes you make may not be visible to your visitors. Most of these solutions won’t show the cached version to the Administrator, so you’ll be blissfully unaware that your revisions are not included in the cached version your visitors see..

Broken hosting

Server timeouts or long download times for your visitors and search engine robots can dramatically increase your bounce rate, cause visitors to conclude your site’s down (perhaps permanently) and affect rankings. If your website is temporarily unavailable, generating a 404 Page Not Found error when Google bots come by to index your site, this can severely hurt your search engine rankings.

The lowest priced hosting plan can be the worst deal out there. When we take on a new client, we frequently inherit a new host. Consequently we’ve dealt with more than 80 hosting companies over the years. The host we’re putting clients with these days is Media Temple, cloud hosting, and it’s also where this website is hosted. I love “transparent” hosting; the kind you never think of except when the monthly or annual hosting fee appears on your credit card statement.

Final thoughts

Always, have a recent backup of your server’s root directory files and database dump stored on your own hard drive or Dropbox! Never assume your site if still working perfectly. Check it for a few minutes almost every day, even if you haven’t made any updates for a while. You may want to run a link check right now…

Have you ever had that sickening feeling where you asked yourself, “Oh my God, I wonder how long it’s been like that?” Are there any tools you like to use for checking the integrity of your site or for automating backups? I welcome your comments and questions below.

Feeling a bit overwhelmed over your website, SEO, content marketing and social media? A free 20 minute coaching call could be a game changer.

Menu

Are you trying to “sell”, while still “renting”?

Final thoughts

CON: IDX (MLS Reciprocity) listings should be public

PRO: Registration should be required before IDX listings are displayed

Final thoughts

So what makes a website design good?

Final thoughts

Broken links

Broken menus

Broken images and other content

Software issues may have broken your site

Broken hosting

Final thoughts