How Design Impacts Sales

 

The primary function of a website is to provide your visitors with information. Every individual website will have a secondary function, for an estate agency website this will likely be search for property, sign up to email alerts or share knowledge.

There are over a billion websites, all with their own unique styles, layouts and designs.

In many cases the main reason why some of these sites find successful and some fail is simply down to design.

Design can have a huge impact on sales without you really noticing. Here's why design is so important to every estate agency website:

1) Readability

A common fault with many websites is the lack of readable content. If your visitors can’t read the content on your website, they will simple find the information they are looking for elsewhere and once a visitor leaves your website, you’ve lost a potential customer.

All of the content on your website needs to be easy to read and understand. Your content needs to be appealing to your target audience, using simple English. Don’t try to use overly complicated jargon to make yourself look more professional, it will just confuse your visitors.

Your content needs to be clearly laid out in a way that readers can easily digest it. It needs to be well structured with no spelling or grammar mistakes.

2) Wide range of compatibility

Once upon a time, visitors would only access your website from a desktop computer. Now you have to accommodate for a wide range of devices from wide screen desktops to smartphones.

Your website should have the ability to readjust to fit any size screen, to ensure that the content, images and website can be accessed and viewed easily. Having great user-experience is a must for all websites these days and can’t be neglected.

3) Good architecture

Another thing that is commonly overlooked is how a websites pages are structured. The pages need to be laid out in a way that makes sense and follows a well-planned path.

For example, the property search function should lead to a selection of relevant properties; those properties should be able to be searched easily at a glance, then lead to a more detailed property page. This page should then give you the option to call the agent to get more information or book a viewing. A clearly thought out path can have a huge impact on the selling process.  

4) Call-to-action

Call-to-actions are crucial for any website. On every page of your website you will want your visitors to do some form of action. The thing you use to get them to perform this action is called a call-to-action.

Every page on your website should have some form of call-to-action, this could be anything such as a property search function, a sign up form or a call now button.

Whatever it is, you need to make your intentions clear to your visitors. The call-to-action needs to stand out, be in an obvious and clear place near the top of the page and have gripping, clickable content.