By So, it’s time for a new website for your estate or lettings agency. You’re last one is starting to creak a little in its old age and you want to have something shiny and new for your clients to enjoy. You find a developer and you say “Hey, let’s make something amazing!” Eager to oblige, your developer gets out their notepad and says “Great! What sort of thing are you looking for?” this is where you realise you don’t have a fully fleshed out idea.
Not knowing exactly what you want is fine, it’s what designers are here to help with. However, there’s a lot to consider when outside of the standard “looks nice” remit. While that’s an important factor, there’s a lot to consider before any design work begins.
What do you want your site to do?
It sounds painfully obvious, but it’s pretty commonly over-looked. Let’s take an estate agent for example, there’s a lot that can be done to change the focus as soon as a visitor lands on your home page. Want more sales? Making the property search a prominent feature will make that clear. Maybe you have no problem selling but you need more stock? Making your valuations a focal point will drive more people there.
Making sure you know exactly what you want to get from your website will help your designer achieve that for you and know exactly where to place focus. This will save you from having a fantastic website that doesn’t do the job you want it to.
Your content:
As well as the website being easy to navigate, the text on it should be too. Patience is something that we don’t have a lot of in this day and age. We want everything now and that extends to information about your company. It’s important that no matter how much content you have, it’s easily digestible. This can be achieved in many different ways:
- Sub headings breaking up large blocks of text (like this article)
- Bullet point lists (such as these)
- Cutting out any unnecessary information (like the points in the brackets above)
There’s a lot more to it than these simple points, but they’ll get you on the right track to writing content that people actually want to read.
Provide your brand guidelines:
It’s all well and good asking a developer to design you a website, but without pre defined brand guidelines it can be hard to get the tone right. While any developer worth their salt will talk over the design with you before-hand, brand guidelines will ensure that your website enforces the same brand ideology as the rest of your business.
Have great imagery:
A picture says a thousand words. The average adult in England reads at a rate of about 300 words per minute, which means it’ll take 3 minutes and 20 seconds to read a thousand words. When a user lands on a web page they normally make their mind up on if their hanging around in 8 seconds! That’s enough time to read 40 words. If you want to get the most a new website, be prepared with stand-out imagery for each of the pages you want, it’ll get you far more noticed.
In conclusion:
Getting a new website takes a lot more thought than waking up and just deciding you want one. Sure, you could do that, there’s hundreds of template services out there and some of them are even free!
As with anything though, you get what you pay for. If you want to strongly represent your brand in a world that’s becoming more and more digital, there’s a lot to think about.
Found yourself stuck? Or just want to talk about what you should take into consideration? Chat to us at Estate Apps and we’ll do what we can to get you heading in the right direction.
