Two things: good marketing, and product usability.
These two things are inseparable. If you drive all the traffic in the world to your website, but it's cumbersome and difficult to use, they will leave in droves, and you will have accomplished nothing. If you spend a fortune on creating the most user-friendly product that your client would want but you don't tell anyone about it, you've just wasted your money.
So let's look at what it means to make your Real Estate website user-friendly...An excellent resource for all things in the field of Usability is Jakob Nielsen's site useit.com.
What you WON'T find on his site is a pretty webpage with a lot of pictures and flash animation. In fact, there isn't a picture to be found. It is a very utilitarian page--just text links--but very easy to use.
Now I know that a Real Estate website is different. Images are part of creating a distinct brand. But before you shell out hundreds of dollars to add lots of flash to your website, think about the purpose that it's going to serve. Is it going to make your site look more professional or enhance your brand, or is it going to slow the load times of uses who have slow connections and frustrate people? Every element on your site should be well thought out.
According to the article Usability 101, usability has 5 key components:
- Learnability: How easy is it for users to accomplish basic tasks the first time they encounter the design?
- Efficiency: Once users have learned the design, how quickly can they perform tasks?
- Memorability: When users return to the design after a period of not using it, how easily can they reestablish proficiency?
- Errors: How many errors do users make, how severe are these errors, and how easily can they recover from the errors?
- Satisfaction: How pleasant is it to use the design?
From Usability 101:
Why Usability is Important
"On the Web, usability is a necessary condition for survival. If a website is difficult to use, people leave. If the homepage fails to clearly state what a company offers and what users can do on the site, people leave. If users get lost on a website, they leave. If a website's information is hard to read or doesn't answer users' key questions, they leave. Note a pattern here? There's no such thing as a user reading a website manual or otherwise spending much time trying to figure out an interface. There are plenty of other websites available; leaving is the first line of defense when users encounter a difficulty.The first law of e-commerce is that if users cannot find the product, they cannot buy it either."
Usability and marketing are two sides of the same coin--both are vital for your business if you are going to succeed. I'll talk about what makes for good usability and good marketing in future posts...
