Friday, January 22, 2010

Luxury Real Estate Web Design: De-clutter Your Home Page!

As luxury real estate marketing professionals you understand the importance of staging a home to increase its appeal. One of the first rules of staging is to get rid of the clutter. It is also important to realize that the same principle applies to your own website, especially your home page.

What if you approached a home and there were 100 front doors from which to choose your entrance to the home? That is the feeling on many luxury real estate websites that are cluttered with too many bells, whistles, gadgets, links and unclear navigation.

Are you trying to trying to keep up with your competition by adding every conceivable gadget or widget on your home page? Attempting to please your clients and making sure you are keeping up with your competitor by adding the same gizmos is a sure-fire way to clutter up your website and chase away business. De-clutter your home page by finding a better place for the weather report, the schools, the city hall, the concierge, the news feed, and the webcam.

Flash Does Not Equal Cash!

Spare your visitors the dizzying flashing slide shows. Flash does not equal cash! Unless it is used very, very sparingly, subtly and elegantly, Flash can be extremely annoying. It may create a pleasant effect the first time. But, it can immediately get old and deter visitors from returning which is the key to the value of your website as a lead capturing tool.

Flash slide shows, on your home page, are no longer original. We recently did a thorough competitive analysis for a client in a very upscale marketplace. We actually viewed the websites of the top 5o agents there. The overwhelming majority used Flash slide shows on their homepages. What used to be novel has become commonplace. Flash slide shows on home pages are now considered a flash in the pan!

Think like a home stager. De-clutter your home page on your website!

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