The best practices for designing a business website are more or less the same for every industry. However, when it comes to the real estate business, there are some additional steps that need to be taken by the design team.

Today, we’ll discuss these additional, and important, measures which add to the list of best practices for real estate website design.

Allow advanced navigation option

Searching for information on your website should not become a challenge for the visitors, and you need to make sure of that at all costs. 

And, simply putting a ‘search’ bar at the top of your homepage won’t do you much favor than any regular website search. 

In order to take your real estate site to the next level, you'll need to bring in an "Advanced Search" page, for buyers who know exactly the sort of property they're looking for. Additionally, you'll need and an "Interactive Map Search" to provide a holistic search experience for buyers looking to feel out the entire area. 

Provide a number of ways to search for and sort homes for sale by common criteria like location, the number of bedrooms, ascending and descending listing price, square footage, and age.

Work on the aesthetics

We have repeatedly emphasized, in our blogs based on website design tips, on the fact that your website should be clean and neat enough to keep your audience engaged.

Therefore, it is important that you work on the overall aesthetics of your website design.

-Make sure you are not bombarding your web pages (especially, the home page and about us page) with unnecessary content. Keep it to the point.

-Ensure your business logo in the header and footer.

-Use the right color scheme throughout the website.

-Ensure appropriate use of whitespace on all pages.

Highlight the important stuff

This website design best practice for real estate business can be considered as the extension of our first point. 

Since the visitor to your real estate website would be interested in searching for properties, you can give your website an edge by highlighting the latest listings or giving certain properties a special tag.

This would help in grabbing immediate attention of your website visitors to a particular set of property listing and keep them engaged for a longer time.

You can highlight special features and discounts on the home page from where your navigation stream can redirect them to the property page.

Also, you can make use of interactive features to capture new leads and collect email addresses. This can easily be done through contact forms or downloadable brochures for individual properties.

Use high-quality ‘Optimized’ images

This is one of the most important – and necessary – best practices for real estate website design to be followed without fail. 

We know you must be wondering, “What’s there to explain in this? Adding pictures is a given and everyone does it!” 

Well, that’s where the difference is (and why you need to read this informative blog).

Simply putting out pictures of the property listed on your real estate website is not enough. You need to ensure that you are using the right set of images with the right kind of resolution. 

You need to have several images for a single property which reflects all its features; such as,

-Rooms

-Kitchen

-Balcony

-Washrooms

-Toilets

-Entrance

-Neighborhood

Now, including so many high-resolution images for each property listed on your website can impact your website pages’ loading speed drastically, which is a deterrent for your website’s conversion rate. 

Therefore, you don’t simply use heavy sized image files but, optimize them all before uploading them on your property pages.

Add a blog to the website

You simply cannot keep your website neat and legible by bombarding it with each and every detail in textual form. And that’s why adding a separate blog page is always recommended. 

Not only will you be able to provide every necessary detail and other additional information through your blogs but, also it will help in improving your SEO rankings (discussed later in this article). 

However, it is important to remember that your blogs must be original, fresh, and should provide important insights about real estate and purchasing properties. 

Use testimonials to your advantage

Testimonials are great trust signals and are highly recommended as one of the best practices for real estate website design. 

Testimonials and reviews from your past customers can help generate trust and establish the credibility of your real estate firm. These can work strongly in creating a positive image of your firm in the eyes of your potential customers and pushing them to take the decision of contacting you. 

But, like every other element used in your website design, this too needs to be optimized and used strategically.

Use the latest and top reviews, and make sure all of them are original testimonials.

Ensure proper SEO applications

In one of our earlier points on using a blog for your real estate website, we had mentioned how it helps in improving your website’s SEO ranking. Well, that’s just one practice to fulfill this objective.

There are several other steps you must take to ensure your website is optimized well to appear on top when searched through several different search engines. 

Some of these steps include;

-Backlinking

-Interlinking

-Using industry keywords

-Installing a proper site map

Given the fact that a large section of buyers today search for properties online (that’s why you have a website in the first place), it is a must that you optimize your website for search engines.

To conclude…

So these were some of the best practices for a real estate website design which you must follow in order to improve the overall performance of your website. 

If you are looking for professional help with your website design, simply send us a Hi at support@graphicszoo.com