It Has Great Content, But Does
Your Site LOOK Easy to USE?
By Bill Koelzer

You take a look at the home pages of two different agents’ web sites …each home page is just PACKED with content, and with links that lead to content.  But one page looks like a dream to navigate and the other….well…ever wind your way through a corn maze, or look up the word, labyrinth?

So, how come one high-content site LOOKS so easy to use and another one doesn’t.  The answer likely lies in the agent’s inability to adequately “pigeonhole” pieces of data on his home page.  You see, it is the pigeonholing of text, graphics, gradations of shade, lines, shapes, forms, and photos, in a logical fashion, that creates order and symmetry on a page.  THAT is what makes a web page LOOK easy to use.

Think in Terms of Modules

When you get a web site from Advanced Access the pages it contains are already designed in an orderly manner—data on them is pigeonholed where it best fits and where it looks the best.  But after YOU start adding content to your pages is when you need to organize your items into separate, distinct SEGMENTS, or BOXES, or pigeonholes, of data.

For example, let’s look at the Advanced Access newsletter of Oct. 22, 2004, the Halloween issue, and see how IT is organized.  First, notice that it tells you what it IS---the Marketing Newsletter…most agent sites don’t even have a headline to inform people that, yes, the people DID arrive at what they were searching for.  (For example “Ionia County real estate” or “Portland, Michigan Area real estate.”)

Next, note that the newsletter has graphics highly relevant to the subsequent Halloween subject matter---You see a witch on a broomstick, along with a spooky-bloody red headline.

Did using those elements in those exact places require some CREATIVE thinking?  You bet it did.  (A relevant graphic or photo is worth the proverbial thousand words.)  And that’s what you need to apply to your site:  Forethought!  Even if you HIRE someone to work on your site for you; you can STILL supercede their creativity (or lack of it) and TELL them what to put where.  YOU need to ensure your pages are logical, but moreover, LOOK easy to use.  Don’t leave that up to someone else. 

On the Halloween newsletter page again, note how the little boxes off to the right side are all shaded to set them apart from the main portion of the page. (Note - You can see those boxes on the right hand side of THIS Marketing Tip!) But these set-apart items are not just “pigeonholed” by shading, they are also set apart by ….

1.  a smaller column width for the text, and

2.  a BOX that surrounds the data.

		E-Mail Signatures
	Your e-mail is an extension of your business, so be sure you have an effective signature on all of your online correspondence. Your signature should include your pertinent information, and entice your recipients to contact you or to visit your website. Click here for more details.

Subheads, Like This One, Create Order on a Page

Another tactic for creating order on a page is to use subheads, and to make the first few words of a paragraph be darker than the rest.  Subheads can be read at a glance and are like headlines in a newspaper.  Bolding of the first few words draws attention to those words and foretell a NEW topic under discussion.  Note how these tactics are used in the two paragraphs, taken from the Halloween newsletter:

is almost here and as you can see, the witches, ghosts, ghouls and goblins have been skulking about the Advanced Access headquarters in Anaheim Hills.23

Halloween marks the beginning of the official holiday season.  That’s why we enjoy sending our Annual Halloween Marketing Tip as there are many lead generating ideas that you can incorporate NOW - before the holiday actually arrives.  These ideas can be a great addition to your marketing and advertising campaign and you might need a week or two in preparation. We would also be interested in hearing how YOU prepare for the holidays and how your holiday ideas relate to your business.  Let us know if you come up with anything fantastic so we may share your ideas with your fellow Advanced Access users!  Also, be prepared for some jokes and links for your entertainment below.  We hope they don't frighten you too much...

You can do the same thing on your pages by alternating one or two different and appropriate fonts with your main default font.  Just never overdo your font mixing.

Yes, YOU CAN Design An Orderly Page; Even
if You’ve Never Designed Anything Before

In order to have a very orderly, logical, geometrically simple-to-follow home page you do not have to create a PR6 Google-ranked web site, nor have been around on the Web forever, either.  Look at the relatively new site of the realty team of Rogan and Brow, serving Fallbrook, Temecula Valley, and North San Diego County. 

Their site is only a PR3 with only 27 backlinks (shown in Google, anyway!).  And it is not in the top 150,000 most visited sites on the web either.  In fact, it is only about the 3,938,583th most visited web site (which actually is pretty good considering that there are billions of web pages out there).  Yet, the team has created web pages that are stunningly easy to read and follow.  In other words, their pages LOOK easy to follow and if perception is everything, then their site would fare well against competing agent sites in the market areas that they serve. 

Here’s why.  Consumers will stay on their site after merely a squint because that home page undeniably LOOKS easy to use---it appears to be a “no brainer,” less taxing, simple, clean, appealing---all that stuff.  In other works, it works.  And it MUST work that way, because the number one thing that you want your site to do is bring you consumer inquiries, right?---ones that you can convert to sales.

Look at their home page---nothing fancy, but you get a feeling from the friendly faces in the picture and their willingness to show you plenty of area photos, that they are eager to EMPATHIZE with you.  And when someone shows up on your site, empathy is exactly what he or she is looking for, yet seldom gets from agents.  That’s because most agents are too busy extolling their awards and NAR designations (me, me, me, me, me) to care much about the visitor.  Those agents and firms are Wrong to be “me” oriented!  People care about themselves.  So slant your site to their needs! Be you, you, you, you-oriented and use that “you” word a lot.

Think about this:  On the Internet, you ARE your web site!

Visit Rogan and Brow’s “Meet our Team” page.  There is nothing graphically astonishing about that page.  It is just artfully simple, text items are logically placed alongside the photos so you have no doubt if the text is referring to the picture above or below it, which is often a problem with the “Our Team” pages of many agents’ sites.

See, too, how Rogan and Brow used text of two different colors to further set apart different sections from the other.  It’s artfully simple.