Designing Websites To Sell A Home – Clean It Up To Be Effective
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Using the internet to sell a home has been a great advantage for those who got on the boat early. The often sited statistic that 80 percent of home purchases originate online is very telling and often told. But now is the time to get a step ahead of the competition if you are a first mover.
How you ask?
Clear out the closet and stage your site.
This is a trick that real estate agents have used for a long time now called staging a home.
A new study by one of the worlds top usiability experts, Jakob Nielsen has come out with a study on how to get your users to retain information and better utilize your site.
Get rid of the clutter. Sure it is great to give all the information but in reality most of it will be confusing and lose the potential buyer.
Look at this example they use in the story at the Annenberg Online Journalism Review:
The left hand column is done on the traditional way. Lots of data but little comprehension. The right hand column had a 34 percent higher comprehension level by those who read both. Here is the eye chart for the page.
Imagine having your clients remember and understand your material by a third more. That is powerful. But when you tell a seller to clear out the clutter it is following the same principals and typically has the same results.
I have used this principal when I redesigned The Real Estate Bloggers. I got rid of most of the eye candy on the site and reduced it to the bare essence and created more white space. Readership has gone up 40 percent since I made the change. Now is that solely because I redesigned the site, no. However, some of the growth is because of the redesign and I have been very pleased by the results.
Noe, go read the full article at Online Journalism Review to find out more tricks that will make designing your website to sell a home much more successful!
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Comment by Caleb Mardini on 14 March 2007:
Great post tom. This is something that would be good for a lot us to take a look at.
Thank you.
Comment by Sharon Simms on 14 March 2007:
40% increase is certainly not to be ignored. Has search engine placement suffered from the word trimming?
Comment by Tom on 14 March 2007:
Sharon
I did not reduce the words but increased the font and the whitespace.
If I was using the site to sell property I would probably use this approach. The initial view of the page would be very clean with lots of white space, then have a link for a page with lots of details.
Comment by Justin Chimento on 14 March 2007:
Ten Ways to Make Your House More Salable
1. Get rid of clutter. Throw out or file stacks of newspapers and magazines. Pack away most of your small decorative items. Store out-of-season clothing to make closets seem roomier. Clean out the garage.
2. Wash your windows and screens to let more light into the interior.
Check out the school district. . . . http://www.ExchangeCA.com Ten Ways to Make Your House More Salable >
La Jolla Real Estate
Comment by Athol Kay on 14 March 2007:
Very much agree about white space and font size. Whats with all the wordpress blogs with the tiny grey colored font everywhere. Ugh!
Comment by Tom on 14 March 2007:
That is why I love this theme.