Are you a real estate agent that is thinking about taking your business online? More and more people everyday are creating an online presence to market their business. This is a huge and expanding market that you don’t want to miss out on. Especially for real estate agent an online presence in addition to other marketing techniques can really expand your business.

This allows people to come to a website on their own time and find out about you as an agent and also look at listing that you might have available. It can provide a nice introduction to your services. It also looks great on your business card because you look a lot more established.

So you might be thinking now that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to get your real estate business online and starting marketing and advertising online. However, most of us are not website designers and therefore it can be a daunting task to get online with a decent looking website. In fact many people who even fancy themselves as designers go ahead and put their own website online but they really shouldn’t. Many of the websites that are online today do not look very professional. So what is a real estate agent left to do? Many consider hiring a web designer. This is a possibility and one that you might want to look into. On the down side though hiring a designer can be costly and often time consuming. Therefore many people are starting to use website templates as a quick and cheap alternative to get their business online.

You can find tons of real estate website templates online. You want to spend some time looking through the templates to find a design that fits your personality. I often find myself even looking in unrelated categories. For example don’t limit yourself to looking in the real estate website templates but try looking under business website templates or professional website templates also. You might find some really great professional website template that will serve it purpose much better then a so called real estate website template.

Some thing that you want to look for in a template:
1. Not to graphics heavy.
2. Quick to load.
3. Stay away from flash screens and too much animation.
4. Stay away from sounds unless they are real simple.
5. Look for a template with a lot of white or open space.
6. The best designs are open and free allowing lots of space for your content.
7. Try to find a CSS coded or validated website if possible
8. Most importantly find one that fits your style.

Number 8 is really important the look of the website will convey a lot about who you are and that is what you are really selling. So it is very important to find a website template that will fit your personality. Are you very professional and business like or more friendly and family oriented?

Some things that you might want to include in your real estate website template are:
1. Contact information
2. About you
3. Houses that you currently have listed
4. Directions to your work and possibly even provide a place where people can type in an address and find their own directions.
5. Possibly a link or graphic of the current weather where you are at.
6. A calendar of future open houses that you will be at and etc.
7. Philosophies, a mission statement or other guides that tell people what you stand for.
8. An interactive chat room to speak with clients who are not in the area currently.

The good method to creating an effective real estate website is to plan ahead. Get out a pencil and paper and sketch out or write down your ideas before you get started. This is something that I still do all the time. Also give yourself a few weeks to come up with the content and ideas for the site and slowly start journaling in your book. You will find that ideas just start coming to you out of the blue. Especially when you are driving if you are like me.

Once you get your ideas you are ready to go about create your website. Best of luck to you and take it slow.


Chris Ryerson the webmaster of Crown Template and other websites wrote this article. To find out more about website promotion, free webmaster tools and real estate website templates check out Crown Templates.

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