Archive for Web Design
What Realtors ought to know about their websites
What was popular for your real estate website a couple of years ago is no longer working. If you have a site that hasn't been updated recently you can relate to this. You've noticed less activity, visits, leads etc. and likely a drop in your search position on Google. This isn't about your meta tags and keywords, it's about your content.
The good news is that you really don't have to throw money at traditional advertising to improve your online search strategy and conversion. And while improving your content takes work, this work can take the place of other less profitable marketing strategies while saving you time and effort in addition to money.
Take a few minutes to view this video. It will help you get in the frame of mind to accept how quickly things are changing. And why you need to change your online marketing strategy to keep up.
Some people think this video is creepy or scary. Change is always a little scary and seeing how quickly technology is evolving can be intimidating but also exciting.
People surf the web to research or to be entertained. If your website is simply an advertisement about how great you are then you are missing an opportunity to connect with your visitor. You won't be able to hold their attention because you are not meeting their needs.
Your affiliations, years in business, awards and sales volume is not content aimed at meeting the needs of your visitors. Don't say "I'm a luxury homes specialist" prove it. Provide interesting information about the luxury home market. Define your audience. Who purchases/sells luxury homes? What topics would be of specific interest to that demographic? Educate and engage your visitors.
Check out the following resources for writing engaging customer focused content:
"First of all, you'd better be blogging. You've got to join the conversation and have something valuable to say before anyone will bother acknowledging you. In the excellent business blogging book Naked Conversations
Quoted from: Viral Copy: Trading Words for Traffic
download the full 30 page report and visit copyblogger.com for more information and articles about viral marketing and creating great content for your real estate web site.
The Customer Focus Calculator (We-We Calculator):
A great tool to illustrate whether your site is focusing on the customers' needs...or just loves the sound of its own voice.
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Lie to Me. Your brochure says you are lying!
I've recently been sucked in to a new TV drama called "Lie to Me". If you haven't seen it, it's about a guy who is supposed to be the world's leading deception expert. He can read you like a book using your facial expressions and body language. They cut in real footage of well known liars in the act of lying and show you how the facial expression or gesture is exactly the same. Fascinating!
While most people don't have PHD's in this field they are intuitive and can detect lies or sense that someone is saying one thing but telling another with their non-verbal language. We call it intuition but an expert will tell you it is not intuition, it's a scientific fact - the difference is that you and I can't name what it is or why we know it. We aren't trained - we just know.
This same concept is true with your marketing materials. Website, brochures, fliers, postcards, newsletters, etc. The personal computer has given everyone the tools to make cool stuff. The problem is that not everyone has the design training or the intuition to use design to effectively support their message. Your brochure copy may be saying you are a waterfront luxury homes specialist while the actual brochure is telling people you are a used car salesman. Or maybe your marketing materials are saying you are lazy, unorganized, downmarket - whatever. The point is your brochure is NOT supporting your message.
An example of this would be a brochure about Home Stageing & Decluttering. This brochure tells us that decluttering will make our home more attractive to buyers. We should agree it's absolutely a good investment to hire an expert to declutter and showcase our home BUT this brochure is putting doubt in our minds and we are not fully sold. Why? Because the clutter and mess on this brochure is even worse than our most neglected spare room! We don't have the design degree or training to name it - we're just not sold.
Consider that having your admininistrative assistant design your marketing pieces may not be in your best interest. Their time could be better spent performing tasks they are proficient with. Designing brochures and ads will likely take them longer than a professional and with sub par results. A more cost effective solution would be to hire a professional to provide you with templates that you can re-use for new brochures, newsletters and so forth. This will cut down costs and give you the added benefit of all marketing materials being professional and consistent.
If you are a die hard DIY person then I would suggest purchasing a professionally designed template or use one that comes with your publishing program which you can modify. There are resources available that will help you improve your layouts by helping you learn to identify what needs improvement and to call out many of the usual amateur pitfalls:
Non-Designer's Design Book, The (3rd Edition) (Non Designer's Design Book)
The Non-Designer's Design and Type Books, Deluxe Edition
Yes! Email Marketing really is that simple.
During the past few months I have been inundated with "fancy" emails forwarded to me by my clients. Each with the same question: How do they do that? I want to do this!
Email Marketing is an easy, effective, and highly affordable way to get your message out, and build strong, successful, and lasting relationships. It is also a great way to reduce the cost of printing and mailing your monthly, quartery newsletter. I am not suggesting that you stop sending newsletters to your farm area but you could certainly invite people to subscribe to your email list the next time you send your mailing. This way you can start to reduce the amount of paper mail you send and build a targeted opt-in mail list.
I recommend Constant Contact to my clients as it is a very simple and affordable way to get started with your email marketing campaign. It helps you create professional-looking emails-fast and with no technical expertise-and build strong, successful, and lasting relationships with your customers, clients, or members. With more than 160 easily customized HTML email templates, a step-by-step Email Wizard, and point-and-click interface-you can create highly visual, compelling email newsletters and promotions in just minutes. Email Marketing makes it easy for you to manage your contact email lists...measure email campaign results from clicks to open rates...and review who joined your email list.
Sign-up for a FREE 60-Day Trial today.
Explore all the features. No risk. No obligation.
Create Your Own Real Estate Listings RSS Feed
RSS (really simple syndication) is a feed that allows your subscribers to receive your "feed" automatically through a feed reader or email. RSS feeds can also be displayed as dynamic content in web pages. A feed will generally consist of a short summary which when clicked will bring you to the full article or detail page.
You can use an RSS feed for any area of your web site that you would update frequently: new real estate listings, price changes, open house schedule, mortgage rates, community news, real estate market statistics and so forth. The feed will allow people to subscribe to your latest updates and can also keep your latest updates posted on your web site and perhaps even posted on other web sites and blogs.
To easily create and publish your RSS feed use a desktop application that provides a wizard to help guide you through the process. I recommend FeedForAll:
Now that you have your RSS feed published (uploaded to your web server) you will want to include links so visitors can subscribe to your feed. You may also want to display your feed content as HTML on a web page or blog and of course you will want to submit your feed to RSS directories and search engines.
A very simple way to get started with displaying, publishing and promoting your feed is to sign-up for a free FeedBurner account.
CMS Pros, Cons and Reviews
The first and one of the best content management systems I've used for client web sites is Content Seed. The system is available in both ASP and PHP versions. The license is very reasonably priced at $149.00 Unlike most software, the license is for unlimited domains and updates are free for life. So if you are looking to add CMS to more than one site this is an excellent value.
Installing and "seeding" a page is a fairly simple operation which involves uploading your files, setting folder permissions and placing a bit of code "the seed" on your page to indicate where the editable text will appear. I should mention here that if you do have any difficulties or question about your installation you will be more than pleasantly surprised with the customer support. Chris Leeds, the developer and owner of Content Seed answers his emails and phone calls personally!
The pros are obvious. Your client can edit the content on the pages you set-up to work with Content Seed. The editor is easy to use, looks like MS Word, has all the editing and formatting features you would expect, including the ability to upload images and supporting files like PDF documents. This system even comes with comprehensive help videos so your clients can see a demonstration of the feature in question. Additioanl features include the ability for cliens to back-up their content and assign user log-ins to edit specific pages.
Really, I can't say enough about this product - it pretty much has it all. And, there is where the Pro and the Con of CMS reside together; In the fact that your client now has a full text editor and the ability to upload images to their web pages.
Cons:
- Clients will overwrite CSS rules by changing fonts, text size, colors, alignment, case, underline & bold everything (because everything is that important!)
- Clients will upload enormous image files. This will result not only in page load time issues but also in page display by exceeding the container size in divs and tables.
- Clients that don't update their site regularly will always forget how to do it and call you for instructions, passwords etc.
- Clients will copy and paste from other web sites and documents picking up code and formatting and inadvertantly drop it into their own site. There is a paste text only function but no matter how often you remind them to use it, they will not.
- You will be contacted to fix these issues on a regular basis.
It has been my experience that unless a client uses the tools regularly and correctly (rare) then I actually spend more time fixing and instructing then I would if I simply updated the site myself. In these cases the CMS is not as cost effective to clients as it could be.
My Love Affair with CMS.
A few years ago I became enamored with the concept of CMS, "content management systems". The idea that my clients could now update pages on their websites without me, well, this was going to change my life, change the way I do business. I would now be free to work on my business, re-design my own website, get up to date on invoicing, start a blog, maybe even do a little grocery shopping and prepare a home cooked meal for my kids.
It may come as a surprise to some of my clients that I don't in fact plan to become wealthy by updating their web pages. The truth is web maintenance often bogs me down. Keeps me from taking on new and challenging web development projects. Dampens my creativity. Makes me grumpy. You get the point, and so my love affair with CMS began much like any new love affair; Blindly, enthusiastically unwilling to see any possible fault or downside to my new partnership. Honestly, perhaps I did have an inkling of a fault or two but this early in the relationship those faults were simply endearing, cute traits that would not matter in the long-term. Easily overlooked in favor of all the positive energy that would be mine now that I had found my soul mate. That is of course, until it began to matter very much.
I wasn't the only one excited about my new relationship. Many of my clients were right on board with CMS. I suppose we engaged in a sort of a menage et trois. They were equally besotted with the idea of updating their own web pages. Giddy with pleasure at the romantic phrase, "cost effectiveness"!
You are no doubt wondering what happened, how did the affair end? As you well know, all affairs that begin with such passion and high expectations burn out, and quickly. I am relieved to tell you that the affair is not over, it has developed into a more mature and realistic relationship.
I was foolish to believe that CMS could solve all my problems, make me blissfully happy and never cause me sorrow. To be honest it never followed through on its single most important promise, that of freedom from drudgery. In fact, I found that maintaining and supporting CMS was even more time consuming than simple web maintenance.
I had intended to share the pros and cons of CMS in this article but instead I see that I have become passionate and long-winded in the telling of "my story" so I will write a follow-up, something with less drama and more practical advice for web designers and their clients who may be considering their own relationship with content management.
