May 2008

The importance of a quality website

HOW important is your agency website?

In a tough marketplace how are you perceived by buyers and sellers?

How regularly do you look at your site and question its effectiveness? Are your competitors’ sites better than yours?

There is no doubt that the last few years have seen several major changes, particularly in the use of the internet and in applied technology.

However, there are still some agents out in the field who have still to fully embrace the advantages of new technology and internet projection.

And some agents still do not have a website of which they are in control! Many have not been updated since they were first developed and, frankly, many are out of date.

There are certain fundamentals about any website that must always be remembered:

The home page is your shop window. It is where you make your first impression. It reflects your brand.

The site must work — and with all commonly-used browsers, not just Internet Explorer.

Homehunters want to get to a selection of property quickly. They do not want to read irrelevant material.

The property search must be prominent and accessible.

They want to see property in a minimum number of clicks.

Not everybody knows the area — showing search results on a map is increasingly necessary.

Photos speak louder than words. Show as many as you can.

Honesty is essential. Do not try to cover up defects.

Speed of data delivery is important. The site should work with lower speed internet connections as well as broadband

Avoid distracting advertising and links that take the user away from your site AND it is vital that you continually re-look at how the website works, where your traffic comes from, which pages are visited, which Google Adwords etc. work, how long visitors stay on the site and how many visitors you are getting — look at the diagnostics.

How does your site match up? How do you compare with your major local competitors? Is it time to revamp what you are doing? Smaller agents can often stand out more than some of their bigger rivals who find it difficult to keep up to speed with web developments whereas the latest developments are now available at a relatively low cost to smaller agents.

Sites are provided by many different types of supplier. Local newspapers, affinity groups and agency suppliers offer them as an add-on to other services.

Estate agency software companies including Vebra, CFP, Aspasia, Expert Agent, Dezres and the like provide sites, as do the property portals.

FindaProperty in particular have produced sites for many agents, as have Rightmove.

And, of course, there are bespoke designs. Some may be expensive and some of the larger agents think nothing of spending at least £100,000 on their website design. But there is no need to spend anything like that sort of money.

Who you use as a supplier of your site depends very much on your budget and the complexity of the site. Undoubtedly, there are now some very good sites that can be made available for relatively small sums.

OPG, the parent company of Estate Agency News, has been providing sites for a number of professions for more than eight years and they are now producing some top quality, excellent value sites that compete with the best.

OPG of course do not need you to buy software — they just offer a web design service to agents.

They have, after all, been partnering with estate agents for many years and have considerable experience in developing websites for them. They have recently added an extremely cost-effective Pay As You Go option with their gold version costing as little as £45 per month.

Estate agents Hemmings of Redditch (www.hemmingsagents.co.uk) have an OPG site which includes a map display function.

The OPG sites have the advantage of working with any software system for the search. If the provider has a map search — such as Thesaurus in the case of Hemmings — then that search is shown.

There are other examples — such as www.finchandcompany.com, using Vebra searches; www.blakesestateagents.com, using Dezres searches and www.blomfields.com, using Expert Agent.

All are equally effective and very different in design — it is certainly not just a standard design offering.

In talking to a number of agents that work with OPG, I noted that all were full of praise for the service they receive from the company, including the friendly skilled design team — all available at the end of a phone or by e-mail.

Simon Butnick from Blomfields is particularly vociferous in his praise for the design team he worked with. “They went the extra mile,” he said. “They understood my needs and they delivered. The designers really wanted to help and did a brilliant job. I could have a site set up for a fixed fee but then I would have to pay for alterations. With OPG, I can continually update the site at no extra cost.”

Have a good look at your site, or better still get an outsider to give you an objective appraisal of it — and see whether some changes should be made to what could be the most important part of your marketing to the general public.

OPG’s sites also come with pages of rich content, much of it put together by  the team behind EAN. To find out more about OPG’s Pay As You Go sites or how you can acquire their content for your own site, call 0800 612 1408 or e-mail payasyougo@opg.co.uk.