7 steps to Real Estate Website Success

Your real estate website should be working day and night helping consumers search for homes, find local market data and answer pressing questions. This traffic to your site should give you turnover or convergence (leads from traffic). You may be asking yourself, “How do I encourage this process?”

We have come up with a list of the best 7 practices for optimizing real estate websites. These will help you boost your credibility and provide a better online experience to your potential customers.

1.      Information Accessibility. Visitors come to your website to search for listings. It is important to provide them easy access to view information and pictures of the available properties. You can help promote regular traffic by placing existing listings on the front page and making search features available for visitors to narrow down by preferences.

2.      Contact Accessibility. Your visitors need to be able to contact you right away if they want additional information. This is one of the first steps for converting visits into leads. A contact form or simply a phone number and email on the front page are vital to make that convergence and get you leads.

3.      Play It Simple. When it comes to user experience, simple and organized websites are preferable. The attention span of your regular visitor lasts around 3 to 5 seconds. As soon as your visitor gets confused or frustrated with overwhelming design or navigation, they will instantly leave your website. Do not have anything automatically play when visitors land on your home page, such as music or video. Be clear with your message and don’t bore them with mass word content.

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Advertise for free with craigslist, facebook, twitter

Craigslist:

1. Gain two to three accounts using your phone number and/or your employees’ numbers

2. Create an image for your advertisement that will clearly convey your services, hours of work and contact information.

3. Use visual cues to advertise through craigslist. Upload as many images as possible
(max. 8)

4. Make sure to include your contact information into the image that you imbed with HTML code and not include it as the response address. The reasoning behind this is the heavy spamming that you may receive if you write your actual email address. Even if you use craigslist’s redirect email address, you will still receive a lot of emails that you do not want.

5. Make sure you provide as many locations as you can possibly service. Location might be the only way your future clients will be able to find you through craigslist.

6. Try to list your posts in different categories, for AMROCKET it would be “creative services”, “computer services” and maybe “small business”, because we provide services to small business owners as well.



Facebook:

1. Create a company page and start harvesting those “likes”. The more likes you have, the bigger audience will witness your posts, updates, etc.

2. Every week come up with an interactive image that will portray your new product or offer it in an eye catching way. Here at AMROCKET we come up with funny images that inform our followers about our new services or to announce events. We use humor as a medium to communicate with audience.


3. Remember to keep it short and simple. Get straight to the point and get your message across. We all know how low the average attention span is nowadays.

4. Create pages on your website and link them to your facebook page. When you post a link that leads to your website and somebody likes it, it will automatically give you one like on that website page.

5. Make sure to post images that are not wider than 450px. Otherwise text and image get caught on the sides.

6. Share your posts to attract your audience

7. Take notes of your weekly stats. If one post has more views than others focus on that media type.



Twitter:

1. Get more followers, the more followers you have, the more publicity you have. Also it seems that the number of followers has an effect on your position in search engine for specific key words.

2. Tweet daily and for a reason. Make sure that your posts are linked to your website page, so your followers can visit the page, which creates traffic.

3. Use hash tags (#) to get more followers and reference to trends.

4. Use different mediums with your tweets: videos, images and plain text to keep your audience interested

5. Make sure your twitter account is tied up with your facebook page. Twitter will automatically post your twitter post to facebook.

Original article http://www.amrocket.com/blog/Advertise_for_free_with_craigslist,_facebook,_twitter

The price of cheap web development

Cheap Web Development
Everybody has a website nowadays. But those who you do not want to build one as cheap and fast as possible. There are a lot of small and large companies that feel important to invest the right time and money into something important as their web representation. However, there are always companies who decide to take the quick and cheap rout and hire a cheap web development company.
Here are the things to avoid:

1. Hiring one freelancer for a big project:
Freelance is a great way for amateurs and professionals to make money on the side, but when it comes to large projects that convey heavy graphic design, back and front end programming, search engine optimization, it cannot be taken lightly. Freelancer can promise you amazing time frames and can even give you a great deal with the cost; however, it is very hard for one person to complete a large and complicated project in a small time frame. So be careful, and ask your freelancer that you are about to hire if he can guarantee the project completion on paper.

2. Hiring a cheap company that promises and swears to complete a huge project for cheaper and faster than anybody else.
Yes, saving money is great, but believe me, we had clients that came to us after being cheated or tricked out of their money. If you do not pay with money, you usually pay for your widely extending time frame, or hidden fees and the list can go on and on.

3. Hiring a company from a third world country.
American economy is suffering enough that there are not enough business here, but people still outsource jobs across the ocean. But if that does not make you feel bad for hiring a company from a third world country to do work for the third of the actual cost, let me bring some other reasons that might change your mind.

One of the positive aspects of hiring a professional, and what even better - local company for a web development job, is the ability to meet the team yourself. Business that is done on the larger distance tends to be less successful and more time consuming. A classic example of this would be one of our current clients stuck with a serious problem concerning their website performance due to inability to reach their website provider for weeks. In the end they came to us and we had to solve their problem, which we of course did.

Another great example would be lack of skills or an outdated set of them. In this modern vibrant business of web development it is important to keep up with the progress and maintain you skill set sharp. In many cases, we had no chance but rewrite poorly written code or redo poorly developed graphic theme that was performed by the outsourcing companies or companies from the third world countries

I know that after reading this much, you probably realize that there is no way you could get a professionally done website for a reasonable amount of money and in a reasonable time. Well it is not true. There are hundreds of ethical and talented web development, graphic design and search engine optimization companies that would love to work on you projects and help you to solve your problem. All you need to do is a little bit of research, ask the right questions and give just enough information about your idea to find the right company.

Original article: www.amrocket.com/blog/The_price_of_cheap_web_development