Category Archives: Web Design

How Real Estate Companies Can Best Improve Their Landing Page

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When potential home sellers, buyers or renters start making searches, getting your real estate business to stand out so they can find it is a top priority. If you’re a real estate agent who’s buying or selling, landing pages can be more effective than high-profile listing sites for getting people to your offers. The challenge with all landing pages, though, is making a conversion. Here is a guide to making a high-conversion landing page.

Streamline

Your landing page should be simple and to the point in all aspects, including the copy, images, calls-to-action and search forms. As the business owner, you might be interested in everything your business offers. But a buyer is looking for something specific. A well-performing landing page gives them just that.

Add Unique Content

What goes on an optimized landing page? Anything with high impact that communicates your product or subscription benefits. Avoid rambling paragraphs or dull graphics. According to eRealty Advisors, you need to use video shorts, testimonials, e-books, quotes, photos and more to establish yourself as an authority in your area. Imagery sets the tone and shows what people imagine when they think of real estate, such as obtaining a dream. Photos should evoke feelings, be specific to your offer and present examples of the lifestyle it can provide. Written copy should be condensed and hit all the points a visitor needs to make a decision.

Real estate is about trust. Text should reveal the facts or common concerns, like location, number of bedrooms or fees, that make a case for action. Videos make a connection between the visitor and the product. They can function as tours and are perfect for real estate as moving backgrounds, providing insight and a sense of place. Testimonials build more trust by letting your customers do the talking for you.

Types of Landing Pages

According to Express Writers, well-written landing pages produce conversions and drive a revenue stream. Depending on what your landing page should do, there are generally two types of landing pages: click-through pages and lead gens.

Lead gens, or lead generation pages, are forms for email addresses, names or other pertinent information. They’re calls to action that assemble customer lists for future promotions. Often, informative e-books or web presentations work as incentives in exchange for a visitor’s lead data.

Click-through pages skip long-term promotion and go for a product subscription or sale, typically with one click point taking the visitor to the store checkout to make a sale.

Landing pages are excellent converters because potential customers, whether they come from Google, Twitter or promotional emails, arrive already wanting to know about your offer. Once they get there, they find a page entirely geared to explaining what it is and a clear option for taking action by signing up for promotions or making a purchase.

Want a website that attracts customers to your real estate business? Let us help you!

3 Things All Chamber of Commerce Websites Should Do

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We first started designing websites for Chambers of Commerce back in 2011 when we joined our local chamber and found they needed help with their website and how they presented their brand online. We learned a lot about the tools needed to integrate with membership, how users interact with Chambers online, and how best to cultivate a community to help business grow.

Five Chambers, Eight websites, multiple years-long seats on Chamber Marketing Committees (and currently Board Chair of one our local chambers), and several rebranding projects later we have learned a lot about what it takes to make a chamber successful online.

If we had to boil it down to three things though, they would be this:

1. Make Sure Your Website Fits Your Chamber’s Personality

We currently belong to five different Chambers of Commerce and each one of them has it’s own distinct personality. Going to a networking event in the most affluent suburb of our city is a much different experience than attending one in a rural town an hour away.

Celebrate your differences.

The things that make you different are the things that answer why a member should join, renew, or become more involved.

Your website should be an extension of what it’s like at your networking events and should speak to your target member and serve your current membership so there isn’t a big disconnect between meeting in person and meeting on the internet.

Tigard Chamber Of Commerce (2011)
Tigard Chamber of Commerce (2016)
Tigard Chamber of Commerce (2019)

2. Make Sure Your Website Is Easy To Update

One of the key components to a successful Chamber website is activity. One of the biggest barriers to that activity is not knowing the tools well enough or having an administration interface that is difficult to manage.

When we first starting building sites for Chambers of Commerce, we recommended a powerful CMS that offered a lot of granular features that allowed people to leverage many different positions on the website; if they knew how to use it.

The trouble with that approach was that most Chamber staffs don’t have the time to learn a sophisticated tool and leverage it to it’s best ability. So, most of the advanced features went unused and the sites became a chore to manage.

We found that a better way forward was to use a simpler CMS that accomplishes the most common administration features easily to remove the barrier to making updates. After all, the updates are the biggest part of a thriving community.

We also include multiple training sessions with staffs at launch and after they’ve had some time with it in the public eye to be sure everyone knew how to use the tools and that we could make administration function more easily.

The point here is, if your website is difficult to use then you should make a change, get some training, or reach out for help. Nothing kills a website like no activity.

Lebanon Oregon Chamber (2019)
Lake Oswego Chamber (2013)
Wilsonville Chamber of Commerce (2018)

3. Make Your Website Your Online Hub

There are many differences between Chambers, but one of the commonalities we see between them is a big spike in traffic the day before a scheduled networking event to see where it is and then traffic dies down until the next big event.

While users are there at your website, make sure they know the most important things to know about the Chamber in 10 seconds or less.

If you have a big event coming up, make it the first thing they see when the website loads. If you have a strong Instagram feed, display it on an area of the home page. If you have a blog (hint: you should have a blog), make sure the recent posts are accessible on the main page.

Whatever is important to the fabric of your community, highlight that. Whatever you do well online, make sure that’s included. Your home page is a snapshot of who you are, so make sure what is important is easily accessible for everyone who visits.

5 Things You Should Do To Spring Clean Your Website

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Winter has a way of making people put their heads down to get through the short, cold days to get to Spring. As the days get longer and the sun shines brighter, it gets a little easier to check in and assess the current state of your website.

How is the traffic? How are conversions? Is everything working? Whatever your situation, here are five things you can do to help answer those questions and position yourself for the future.

1. Check your forms to make sure they’re working.

It can happen without you realizing, but your contact forms can suddenly stop delivering. Electronic mail delivery is always in flux with anti-spam measures, server changes, and different delivery protocols. What works today, may not work tomorrow. We recommend running contact form tests once a month just to ensure there isn’t a problem with receiving your emails.

Contact form submissions are the desired result of most service-based businesses, so do a check in to make sure you are hearing from people who want to contact you.

2. Check the date on your website.

It’s fairly common to put the year and copyright in the footer of your website. It’s also fairly common to forget about it and leave it alone as time passes. The problem here is that an old date is a subtle sign to users that your website isn’t up to date (even if that’s not really the case).

So, when you go to your website, just do a quick check to make sure it displays the current year. Bonus points if you can make the year on your website change automatically from year to year so you don’t have to worry about it anymore (hint: we know how to do this).

3. Make it easy to contact you.

When a user first gets to the website, is it easy for them to find your phone number? Address? Contact Form? Social Channels? Whatever the desired action is, you should make it as easy as possible for the user to do it.

It’s also a good time to revisit what a successful interaction with your website looks like. Is it spending time on your site? Reaching out and making contact? Buying something? Be clear on your goals and make it easy for the user to accomplish them.

4. Update your social channels.

This one has two meanings. First, take a look at your website and make sure your relevant social channels are linked correctly. The social landscape changes quickly and many of the networks from last year could have changed, shuttered, or not seen much recent activity.

Second, update the social channels you’re using (meaning, if you choose to display them on your website, you should try to interact on the channels to show activity). It’s great that you have a Youtube channel, but if you’re last video was from 2015, does it really deserve a badge on your website? Use them or lose them.

5. Post a blog

Do you have a blog section? Do you update it regularly? Did you know it’s one of the best forms of self promotion you can do on the internet?

If you answered no to any of these questions, this is the action for you. Just stop reading and go write a blog post (or get in touch about how to make it happen). Blogging has so many benefits (expands your keywords, shows you update your site regularly, positions you as an expert, I can’t list them all because there are too many, etc), that it’s time to make it a part of your routine.

So, that’s a pretty easy list, right? All told, you could probably accomplish most of this in less than an hour and have a fresh presentation for Spring. As always, if you have questions about anything, please reach out. We are here to help and encourage success wherever we can.

We Turned 15 And It Feels SO Good!

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We want to say “Thank you” to each and every one of you for the support we have received over the past 15 years. Our Anniversary Party was a huge success. We hope those of you who were able to attend had as much fun as we did and made some good connections.  

Throughout the year we will be having other events and giveaways, so please keep engaging with us on Social Media and keeping an eye out for those. You can see some of the pictures from our party on Facebook.

Congratulations Project Homeless Connect on winning our Grand Prize of a FREE website for one local Non-Profit. We have already had our kickoff meeting and look forward to working with Kim and her volunteer team to raise awareness and assistance for their mission.