Real estate web design companies handle dozens to hundreds of websites for Realtors each year. There are key areas real estate agents and brokers can address to accelerate their company’s real estate website projects and avoid certain web design bottlenecks. Two key web design bottlenecks are the text content and image content.

Much like your customers review your home listings online before contacting you, look at your web designer’s portfolio to get an idea of the pages you can use to put your marketing message online. Make a list and begin assembling the content you will use. Key area of focus for both the search engines and marketing is your home page. Next prioritize the pages that have your keywords in the titles, these need content to reinforce the keywords

Especially concentrate on the information that appears in the web design “above the fold” – the images and content in the first paragraph or so that your visitors see without scrolling down the page. Market research shows that website visitors that aren’t attracted by what they see above the fold, generally never scroll down to read the rest of the page.

Choose your graphics and begin building a high-resolution image library. IMCD Web Design offers a list of stock photo companies to our real estate website clients where Realtors can secure royalty-free professional images of property and landmarks in their town. Hiring a professional photographer to create a library of unique images for your company is another option. Your web designer can size the graphics and save them in the resolution necessary for maximum impact and speed of loading for your real estate website. It is always better to start with high-resolution images since they may be cropped prior to final sizing and placement.

The use of professional photographs in your web design is also a wise positioning move. Research by various real estate and web design companies found that home buyers searching online valued homes several thousand dollars higher if the photos of the house were taken by a professional photographer. Professional photos on your Realtor bio page also improve your credibility with online visitors.

IMCD Web Design works with our clients to accelerate their web design projects from conception to completion by providing a checklist of not just items, but sample pages to help stir creative juices on creating web content and choosing attractive images. If you are just beginning or are an experience website owner, you will find your real estate website creation process with our web designers a seamless process that rewards you with a powerful online marketing tool.

Professional web designs market a “code validation” feature that means nothing for the copywriting content of the website, however is greatly impacts the graphic presentation and can enhance or hinder the search engine optimization. Web design and development for businesses evolves as the technology available advances. The web standards attempt to make life easier for marketers, business owners, software product developers and web designers by creating the set of rules everyone plays by.

These rules have far-reaching implications in solving the problem: How do you create a web design that utilizes one or a mix of computer codes (such as HTML, java script, or php) that will look the same in different web browsers (like Explorer, Safari or Firefox) to computers that range from older PCs, stripped down netbooks, or proprietary Apple notebooks?

On top of this is the web visitor layer – how fast is their Internet connections (i.e. high resolution graphics load fast or very slow) and their ability to read various print or image sizes. The latter adds a layer of accessibility to the validation layer. Extra code, that is not needed to meet basic web design standards, is available to add sound or extra text to make websites available for those with visual handicaps.

As the current text mark-up language moves towards its next standard, companies should consider the business case for keeping their web design adhering as close as possible to the latest web standard. Currently many websites are alive and well that still use HTML code for both the basic architecture and to spell out the font-styles in line with the web content. Current and future standards use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to move the font style and element positioning code off the web pages, cleaning up the code and reducing web page size and load times.

As Internet marketing competition increases, web designs using CSS will have a four-fold competitive advantage:

1. Their websites will load faster, and according the SEO sleuths, Google rewards faster loading sites with better search engine ranking;
2. The web content is much better optimized for search engine indexing and cataloging;
3. New pages can be coded and added faster and less expensively; and
4. Future graphic design changes can dramatically change the look and feel of the site by making changes in the style sheets and have those changes quickly propagate throughout the web design without needing to edit every page.

IMCD Web Design utilizes the latest web design standards and CSS to give your professional web design the competitive edge it needs to succeed in the online marketing arena. Call our web design pros and move your business into a higher level of sales lead generation.

When weighing real estate web design package alternatives, make sure you address all the areas of the website package and not make the mistake of measuring apples to oranges and buying on price alone.

A satisfactory web design investment will positively impact your online marketing, whereas one missing key features loses your marketing both time and potential financial return.

What are the areas to look for in a complete real estate web design package?

1. Are you clear on all the features of your package? All items in your website should be spelled out – there should be no grey areas or features verbally promised that fail to show up in the contract.

2. Know which areas are not optional in a successful real estate web design. Areas that are not optional are the graphic design, customized graphic images, search engine optimization (SEO) and complete website content. The biggest drawback inexpensive template real estate web designs have are using the SEO as a back-end profit center – an expensive option that newcomers  or Realtors attempting to maximize their return on investment are apt to forego. Putting up a real estate website without search engine optimization and honing the use of the keywords is akin to selling homes in a neighborhood that lacks street signs and home addresses. SEO is the science and art of creating and placing web content that tells the search engine what you do, what your market is, and where you are located.

3. Is all the content filled in when the website goes live? With inexpensive template sites, in a well-meaning effort to allow for the addition of needed content to the website, pages are included for specific information with the “Your info goes here” as the page filler. Too often, you find these websites with no keyword-rich content on those pages months and years after the website launched. Promising information and not providing is a fast way to lose online visitors and a waste of all the print marketing, search engine marketing and optimization you have done to get them to your real estate website.

With IMCD Web Designs, your have all the features of your website spelled out in our easy to follow real estate web design checklist and contract. We create foundational real estate web designs that include all the features needed for a successful website and, when your website goes live, all your content is presented in a , presaged by years of experience creating real estate websites the bring their owners a return on their online marketing investment. Review our Realtor website portfolio and contact our real estate web design staff about your move to better sale lead generation.

A custom real estate web design is a must to successfully serve the luxury property market. Notice how an upscale neighborhood never has two houses, cars or lawns looking alike? Uniqueness and adaptability to individual tastes are drivers in the luxury market. Your real estate web design needs to match the expectations of your potential clients both in the website showing the properties as well as the range of luxury homes for sale offered.

IMCD Web Design has a long history of serving Realtors who have carved out a successful business selling luxury real estate. Each of their luxury real estate web designs shares similarities in the ease of navigation; highly targeted search engine optimization; and a wealth of content sell ling both the real estate services and the luxury homes. However, the similarity ends at the graphic design. Each web design enjoys a custom graphic design that reinforces the uniqueness and exclusivity of the Realtor’s personal brand and their market.

In viewing another firm’s luxury web design, several marketing mistakes popped up. The first was the use of the same template utilized to market to other markets – home page marketing was directed to foreclosure property and first-time homebuyer markets – neither one a main stay of the luxury market. Each IMCD Web Design website for the luxury market is a custom real estate web design that focuses all its marketing and graphic images to that market.

The second marketing mistake was the rampant misspellings in their real estate blog. Stanford University tested factors that affect credibility on a website and misspelled words ranked in the top 10 factors causing visitors to distrust and leave a website. For the size of the investment in luxury real estate, misspelled words translates as a lack of attention to details – the larger the deal the more costly an overlooked mistake can be. Each IMCD Web Design client receives training on the best practices use of their website, from adding and editing property listings to the addition of blog entries – and spell check is included in the real estate blog editor function.

If your online marketing presence needs a competitive upgrade, it is time to contact the custom real estate web designers at IMCD Web Design. We have the graphic design and website optimization experience to help you carve out your niche in the luxury real estate market.

“Dollar for dollar, a professional, functioning website is one of the best investments any business can make – especially at a time when the economy is tight,” reports Matthew Aaron, author of Selling In A Recession. This is especially true for real estate websites – online marketing to generate sales leads in a tight economy is more important than in boom times. IMCD Web Design’s real estate clients report that their real estate websites are accounting for a greater percentage of their sale lead generation.

Sales lead generation and capture is the targeted goal of real estate web design – the effective summation of effective graphic design, informative and keyword-rich web content and search engine optimization that captures web visitors’ attention and contact data.

IMCD Web Design utilized the expertise of professional real estate agents and mortgage industry professionals in the creation of our in-depth online library of articles. Following the principle of giving clients what they need, each article tackles common questions and solves common problems home buyers and sellers face. Without a rich content, a web design is lacking in one of the key areas used by the search engines to index, categorize and rank your real estate websites against the other websites vying for your market’s attention.

Every IMCD Web Design real estate website template design meets the marketing and budgeting needs of single agent websites marketing their persona brand to expanded brokerage and agency versions with agent directories and multi-editor blogs.

The semi-custom template real estate web designs are utilized by many agents effectively expanding their online presence beyond their bio on the brokerage website to a personal brand-creating online presence. These real estate web designs have all the major real estate marketing capabilities from integration of article managers and blogs for ease of content addition and management, feature property search capabilities, and full integration with local MLS or IDX systems – all in an affordable range.

Investment in our professional real estate web designs is a solid business move to make the best of your real estate market opportunities. With multiple real estate web design options and pricing levels, agents can target the best website for their market entry and line-up a strategic path expanding their online marketing presence. Contact IMCD Web Design for your customized real estate web design and improve your online sales lead generation. A successful real estate website is your booming real estate micro-economy!