How to Create a Professional and Dynamic Real Estate Website

What is the importance of a professional website presence for your business? That’s think for a minute. How many times have you come across an opportunity and one of the first things you do is search the company, view their website and determine if they are credible? Let’s face it, in today’s day and age a professional website can make a huge difference for your business.

In this article I will go over what, who, content, even some don’ts on how to best set up a professional and dynamic website presence for your business.

What kind of site do I need?

My career did not start as a real estate investor. Both of my degrees are in business, but I actually started in IT and have 10 years of experience with web development and ecommerce. I know my web technologies and there are endless technologies available, but one that stands out the most Joomla. This is an open source, content management system where you can add already programmed plug-ins and have tremendous functionality, content and professional look and feel to your site. It hits on all criteria when I searched for the best technology including ease of use, flexibility, scalability, performance and especially cost.

From Joomla’s site

Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone.

Who can help set up my real estate site?

Not all people have the time or ability to set up their site, create a professional look and feel, write the content, populate the content, go live and maintain the site. I for one, have so much going on with my real estate business that I searched for an expert consultant and that is exactly what I found. Joomla has a resource center with expert consultants that can help.

What content do I need?

First off, if is important to have a nice professional look and feel with a logo or company name and easy to use navigation. Here is a list of items that are very important for the content of your real estate website.

About Us – briefly explain what you do, your target market, your offering, why you, where, etc. Often this can be your mission statement.
Contact Us – Make it really easy for a visitor to contact you.
Our Projects/Services/Products – It is important to build credibility and show a successful track record as well as market and show you are currently busy.
Blog and News Section – Most of the visitors land at these pages. Whether they find you through a web search or find your link on a forum, email signature, newsletter or social media. Post high quality information and market using forums, newsletters and social media to get traffic, high clicks per visit and repeat visitors.
Competitive advantage – Why us? What do we do best? This is often best a tagline or slogan.
Give out free stuff – The best way to drive traffic and earn money on the web is by giving out free stuff. Free info, blogs, articles, guides, contacts, resources, whatever it may be give out free stuff and you will get traffic, build credibility and have the opportunity to monetize the traffic.

Don’ts

Do not try to make as much money as your can off every visitor thru affiliate links, buy this, buy that, purchase my property, etc. It doesn’t hurt to have some additional income streams but make sure it is appropriate, quality and do not go overboard or it will be a major turnoff.
SEC rules – Financing deals is the biggest challenge for many investors, but this does not mean you can promote “Invest with Us” without an appropriate approach. Do not say risk free, guaranteed and be very conscious of SEC rules as a private investor funding your deal is considered a security and will be regulated by the SEC.

Google Analytics for Joomla Even if you do have a site, I strongly recommend checking out Joomla and implementing some killer content to your site. One last piece of advice, use Google Analytics and all its useful reports to monitor your traffic.

Image by adria.richards via Flickr

Note By BiggerPockets: These are opinions written by the author and do not necessarily represent the opinions of BiggerPockets.