Redesigning your real estate brokerage website — when do you do it?
Many will recommend 2-3 years, which is not bad advice, but I would say, more simply, when it stops suiting you and your users’ needs. Your website is an integral part of your marketing plan, and if it’s not supporting your strategy and fulfilling your audience’s needs, then it’s time to start reconsidering things.
And it can be an intimidating proposition. New is not always better. Users hate change. You might have had your site for a while and you might not know anything else; you might be attached. And the fear of making a superficial investment that inherently does little more than your previous site is a scary concept. The scariest part is having a problem and not knowing about it.
Why consider redesigning your real estate brokerage website?
Today’s modern real estate brokerage website should be an invaluable tool. We have high standards for tools that make up a high-performing one. Among many things, it should have a flexible IDX platform, an integrated CRM and, what I’ll largely be discussing, a great overall user experience. You can learn more about the ones we build here.
Those are three large-scale items, but you don’t want to go through a full redesign if you’ve got two out of three and there might be a perfectly good, quick fix. The point is to honestly evaluate how your current website is helping everyone involved. Whether you have a bad website or even a high performing website, you should ideally have some information to learn from. If you lack the analytics or qualitative data then you almost certainly are in need of some new direction. But whatever information you do have will be indicative of the goals you need to set for your company.
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Once you’ve decided to redesign, you must set out to create designs that meet your goals. So without going over the myriad of situations, here are some foundational principles that partner more thorough redesigns:
Responsive site
We’re getting into an age where this is the only standard and it’s almost a waste of breath to even mention that you should have one, but I’ll do it anyway. Your site should work on every device that your users use, big and small. That’s non-negotiable.
Don’t miss opportunities to engage your audience
Having relatable imagery — and obvious calls to action that attract attention from your specific user base — while educating visitors on your companies’ offerings goes a long way in not just pulling potential leads in, but keeping and converting them. You only have seconds to keep their focus on you. One of our integration partners, Twilio, recently went through a redesign of their homepage. Switching over to a video background that ties in with their tagline, along with cohesive, brand-specific CTAs, illustrated their need to redesign a more engaging first impression.
Content drives design
Figuring out what type of assets are on your real estate brokerage website, will ultimately determine what type of design you’ll make or what content you’ll have to create. Do you blog a lot? If yes, then you’re probably going to make that a prominent part of your site. We build custom real estate brokerage websites, which have flexible Content Management Systems that will help smooth over this process.
Iterative Evolution: “Fashion is never finished”
I’m not sure of its origin, but in the movie “The Social Network,” this phrase was used to describe the work of the team at Facebook. It’s a never-ending task of creating new, exciting things. And although you won’t be putting out changes every month or every quarter, you want to set a foundation for the future, whenever you do decide to make changes. Spend the bulk of your time getting the initial vision down and when opportunities arise to change, make smaller ones, gradually over time and keep gathering data and learning about your audience.
