Estate Agency website mistakes that will lose you business

| Web design

Estate Agency website mistakes that will lose you business

Web design does have certain principles to follow but generally speaking you have to figure out what works for you and your audience. When designing a website you need to remember that your customers will always have their finger on the back-button, ready to leave your site to go to your competitors.

Some web design mistakes are guaranteed to annoy customers and these have the potential to lose you business; here are five of the most common ones we see:

1. Auto Play introductory videos

There is nothing more annoying than landing on a website only to be kept hostage for a few seconds by an introductory video. For some reason so many estate agents think these short message are a great idea, they aren’t. Videos can be great for your website if they are done well but make these videos optional to watch by providing a play button. Let the user view it when they are ready rather than forcing it down their throat.

2. Not having a property search / having a bad property search

As an estate agent most people visiting your website will be there to view properties. Placing these search boxes in an unclear place, not being able to handle certain search criteria or generally making them hard to use are all very common for estate agency websites.

Your search function should be prominent on the page so the user can find it within seconds of arriving. If you provide your users with a poor property search you will leave them frustrated, making them likely to leave.

3. Unclear or no call-to-action

You need to give your users a clear call-to-action, once they land on your site you need to help them find their way to the content they are looking for. For an Estate Agent one of your call-to-actions must be a property search function, other call-to-actions could be directing them to your contact information, getting users to sign-up to your newsletter or social network business page.

4. Not using instinctive navigation

If you have to explain how to navigate your website, you’ve done it wrong. Navigation should be clear to everyone, even those who haven’t seen your site before. Your navigation should stay consistent throughout your website and you should be able to return to previous pages and the homepage easily.

5. Block content

Block content is very hard and boring to read. Our attention span is short; most of us only skim read content online meaning you have to make it easy for people to read otherwise they simply won’t read it.

Break the content up into small chunks and using subheadings or bullet points are favoured. This will make the content look less intimidating and will be easy to read.

Luke Stanley