Builder Designs | Intelligent marketing for home builders

Its no secret that most homebuyers search online to find homes. According to the 2010 NAR Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, 99% of people are using the Internet as the primary source for home searches. Only having a website is not going to cut it anymore and many builders and realtors have already been using and getting educated in technology areas such as social media, email newsletters, blogging, self-managed websites and mobile apps. These are the people that will sell more homes.

The biggest trend for builders this year is going to be tablet and mobile apps that will attract the most tech savvy homebuyers. Developing an app for builders really depends on what type of builder they are and showcasing the homes, plans and communities they build.  Using this app as a point of sale for sales reps not only makes them look smart, it will keep track of their every prospect and will help maximize every new home sales lead. There are endless possibilities for mobile apps and how they can be used.

Having a website that is designed to be responsive to every device that can surf the web is also important. Your old 2005 website may still look great, but will it still look good on an iPad or Android smart phone? Go a step further and have a mobile website designed that is specific for getting homebuyers to what they’re looking for: plans, available homes and always a quick way to contact someone.

The International Builders Show is coming up in less than a month. Check out the latest and greatest in technology for builders at the 1^st annual Builder Tech party! We will have a demo of our new iPad app and our highest performing mobile sites.

A few months ago, Google released a new update to their search engine algorithm, called Panda, that has had very wide-reaching affects, including about 35% of all searches online and the rankings of 12% of those search results.

The reason for Google’s new Panda algorithm is because they are responding to an increasing demand to provide the most useful results. Services such as Facebook and Twitter, whose users expect instant updating, play a big part. This new algorithm helps these search results populate with the freshest news.

This new rollout of Panda has changed dramatically how sites are ranked. Older, low quality sites have virtually disappeared and nicer high quality designed sites have seen their rankings improve. Now the question persists, how do you make sure that your site’s design is seen as high quality?

We’ve talked on these subjects extensively in past blog articles, now may be a time to really gauge your site’s design and functionality or you may be left in the dust for good. Here are some tips on optimizing your site.

Engage Your Audience. A big part of the reason of the for this new algorithm is that Google’s bots are thinking more like humans in terms of site metrics. The more your site engages its users, and the quality of user experience, the better. You may see these types of metrics in your monthly Google analytics reports. The amount of time users spend on your site, the pages per visit and response times are a few to mention.

Mind your P’s and Q’s. Didn’t your mother ever teach you that good grammar is important? Well, she was right and your web copy may be suffering from bad spelling and poor grammar. Google does evaluate the quality of content on web pages. The ability to spell correctly will actually rank you higher than sites that do not spell as well.

Stay Fresh. We’ve said this before and have stressed the importance of creating good web content and copy. This means having original content that sets you apart and defines your purpose. Having a good blog on your site is always a great idea by keeping updated, fresh content that help Google index your site more frequently.

Pack Light. You may want to take a look at how your site is coded and see if it complies with the current web standards. Years ago, designers and programmers used code that was incredibly lengthy and heavy where only 1 or 2 lines of code would do it now. Using good quality code that is more lightweight will improve your rankings.

Using these few tips to evaluate your current site, or when building a new site, will keep you ranking higher and help ensure that your site is up to or above the standard.

If you are a first-time home buyer, taking the plunge into the commitment of buying a home might seem like a daunting task. All first-time home buyers want to make sure they are taking the correct path to a major investment in their life.  Here are some guidelines to follow when beginning the search for your new home.

By the time you have decided to buy a home, you have already passed the major hurdle in the decision making process. Now you are focused and ready to take on the task of purchasing your first home.

The truth is, 80% off all home searches begin on the Internet.  Home buying has become so much easier considering by the time you get to the real estate agents office, you already have an good idea of the type of home and neighborhood you want. With some time spent with your search engine, you can look through hundreds of online listings, pictures and virtual tours of homes and neighborhoods. You can have all of the information about schools and the community before you even step foot into a potential home. The truth is, most of your search is done by the time you get to the actual looking process.

Most first-time home buyers wonder how long it should take them to buy their first home. Considering the fact that it is a seller’s market, many real estate agents only show one home. An unmotivated buyer will take months if not years to find a home. A motivated buyer will buy a home within a few weeks. Most motivated buyers buy a home within a few days.

So how many homes should a new buyer see before making a decision? It is best to limit the number of homes you see in a day to seven. Although it is possible to view 20 or 30 homes in a day, you will not remember specific details about any of them in doing so.  When shopping for a new home, do not treat it the same way you do shopping for a pair of shoes at the mall. When you find the right fit and price, buy it. Most home buyers start off finding a home in the beginning that fits the bill for them, but continue to look around at several more houses, only to come back to the home they originally liked in the first place.

While looking at homes, it is best to keep an inventory of them for yourself to look back at. Take a digital camera and begin a series of photos by taking a photo of the house number to begin with to create a starting place for each series of homes. Take notes of different elements in and around the house and when you leave, rate the home on a scale from 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest.

After you feel like you have toured enough homes, you will most likely instinctively know which homes you are interested in buying. Ask to see these homes again because the second time around you will view the home differently than the first time around.  Also, make a point to call the listing agent to find out the sellers’ motivation and to make sure the homes are still available to purchase.

Once all these steps are completed, you should feel confident you made all of the necessary steps to go out and purchase your first home.

Its easy to understand what makes a good builder website. Users need easily understand the navigation, have well-written text to read and always have a way to get in touch with you or your sales team from a click of a button. Once you have the user engaged, why not give them something else to enhance their experience and to help you create even more leads. Its really a win/win situation. Here are some of the best interactive features for homebuilders to have on their websites.

Search Function – Having a good working custom search tool that will help a buyer find the perfect home is a must. This can be done in a variety of ways from a basic sorter that sorts through your home listings from price, square feet and home type to a more search function that searches down to the number of bedrooms and garages. HHHunt Homes dedicates an entire sidebar to this function.

Interactive Floorplans – This is by far one of the more advanced options available but they are very exciting to play with. Your buyers will become excited about building and have them interested in what customizations you have to offer. Here’s a great example from American Legend Homes Interactive Floorplans.

Mortgage Calculators – These are a great tool for homebuyers to use to calculate their financial responsibility and will help them narrow down what price range they can afford. A quick tool in the sidebar is very helpful as well as having a quick link to a calculator on your available homes pages can help boost interest and leads.

Google Maps/Navigation – Having Google maps on your website not only will help your searchability from the website but also from Google.  Add a mobile website and it gets even better. Direct traffic straight to all of your communities and show homes.

Videos – Utilizing YouTube on your website will create a tremendous amount of interaction. Videos outdo photos and gives the buyer a front row seat to touring your communities, homes or design center without leaving the house. There are awesome ways of using YouTube on your site. See how Simmons Homes uses Cool Iris for their videos from their homepage.

My Favorites – Create a custom dashboard for your interested buyers where they can save their favorites from of your communities, available homes,  floorplans and more. A new lead is created every time someone signs up on your website. They can even print their favorites complete with all your contact information. Goodall Homes calls theirs “My Dream Folder.”

Get the most of your website user experience and try using some of these tools next time you want to upgrade your website.

It used to be that the new homes industry was very in the hands of the agent. They would corral the customer into looking at only 3 or 4 homes and then the pressure was on. The agent would have them ready to choose and purchase one of the homes easily enough. This is not the case anymore; the times have definitely changed.

Meet the Eco-Boomers. Children of the Baby Boomers, they share everything from forwarding emails to YouTube videos and of course the mecca, Facebook. They have changed the way the world communicates and they want information at their fingertips. Well, why not give it to them?

With the power of the internet, many homes are viewed online and some websites are even capable of saving their favorite homes into a Customer Favorites area to view or print later. Not only does the web serve as a tool for the consumer, the mere fact that it is a buyer’s market has everything to do with consumers having control. This is a good thing!

Consumers are coming to the agents and builders with a list of homes they want to see along with the plethora of information that they’ve received from the web. The builder is obliged to collaborate with them and meet all of their expectations.

Its time to engage in everything web from social media to email marketing to having the most user-friendly builder website. Through these channels, you need to show them how you are going to provide them with the best building experience and services possible. There’s a great chance they’ll buy it. It’s about you providing better solutions to your clients so they make better housing decisions.

When deciding to add a mobile site to your existing website there are some important factors to consider. First of all, hire a reputable design company, even using the same one that designed your main website so you can integrate both. People that visit will know and trust your brand and products if they’ve visited before.

Dig a little deeper to understand why users visit your site, even take a look at what similar sites are doing with their mobile presence. For a homebuilder website, they may want to find information about the neighborhoods you build in and homes you have for sale. Getting them quick and easy access to browse the most important areas is crucial. Make sure they have a way to always contact, email or text someone for more information.

Remember that mobile users are not captive like computer users are, so context of use is important to consider. Context is about the environment and conditions of usage, including distractions, multitasking, motion, lighting conditions and poor connectivity. By keeping these in mind, it is important to design for these factors in order to have a decent mobile user experience.

The two major objectives when designing a mobile site are screen size and simple navigation. Make sure that the mobile site is flexible and the design will adapt to small and large screens, even when the orientation of the phone is changed. Such a small screen needs an even more simplified navigation that is intuitive. It is important to reduce the number of pages, categories and levels while arranging based on priority.

Once your mobile site is live, it is important to track its usage through analytics and make sure that users are getting a good experience out of using it.  Occasionally evaluate your mobile site against competitors and identify any changes or additions that could be made to keep your mobile site as updated as possible.

As the web design team is busy designing and coding your website to be fully functional, you may be wondering what you could be doing in the meantime.

If there’s an existing website, you should decide what needs to be added, edited, expanded on or removed completely.  You should also start thinking about new interactive elements you could use that will probably be integrated into the site. Here are some things to keep in mind that will make the task go smoothly.

First, think about who will contribute. Involving more people can make it less time consuming but could complicate things if it isn’t an organized process. Make sure everyone has an area of focus and their responsibility is clear.

Many new websites are created to include the all fun multimedia elements that can be used and implemented. Think about gathering all documents (PDFs), Images, Video, content feeds from other sites such as Virtual Tours and your Social Media pages, feeds and Blog.

A few other things to consider could be including awards you’ve received. Maybe you want to include important client testimonials, team bios, press releases, event calendar, FAQs or job openings.

Whether you are upgrading your current website or starting fresh, the value of good photography and good copy is still very important. Most of the time snapshots from your digital pocket camera will not be quality. It would be worth the expense to invest in a professional photographer to provide you and your shiny new website with the best images possible. If that just isn’t in the budget, consider recruiting a student photographer that will be considerably less. Also, when writing or re-writing copy, make sure its someone who can write very clear marketing copy that is easy to understand.

Once you’ve gathered up all important data, organize it into folders and have it ready for the website. Whether its going to be content managed or static, whoever is going to be plugging in the information has everything at their fingertips for a timely launched project.

There are two distinct sides that come together when designing any website, the relationship of the Client & the Designer. There are goals and objectives that each seek to accomplish and for any website to be a success, these need to be understood by everyone involved.

The responsibility as web designers lies between understanding the users needs, and understanding the needs of the clients’ in return, delivering a product that satisfies both. Not to mention the visual, and understanding design principles and elements. Doing all of this effectively will result in an outstanding website, but being able to balance the first two takes talent.

The most important factor in a web design project is coming up with web-based solutions based on clients’ objectives, needs and motivations. The better the understanding these are, the better decision-making will happen during the planning stages and will extremely help during the design stage. Keeping clients involved in the process keeps them happy and the project on its toes.

Motivations and expectations from the clients’ perspective stem from these categories: Return on Investment, Return on Engagement, Deadline-Driven, Financial and Usability & Accessibility.  The one that is rarely client-driven, but is most important to any web-design project is Usability & Accessibility. This is what turns the wheels and will delegate how the business objectives are handled in a way that the user is satisfied. This is the ultimate goal.

As long as the designer can balance their focus of the website between users’ and clients’ needs, there will be a successful result. They are the experts and they know what works. Another responsibility of the designer is communicating and educating clients on the objectives of the Designer. This will be discussed in a later article.

When you are designing a new website or redesigning one, the importance of good organization is key. Using a Wireframe can be pretty abstract, but you will find that this is essential to the final cut and extremely helpful to us designers. We understand that every client is unique and it is our job to make the website do everything from getting more visitors, more sales to making it easy to maintain and while meeting all business goals at the same time. That is the purpose of the wireframing stage and any preplanning strategy, helping attain all of these needs.

Before the wireframe is drawn it is also very important to have not only a creative meeting, but an overall goal-setting meeting where questionnaires are introduced and preplanning can begin. Online software such as Jumpchart is great at planning websites. This will give us designers all the necessary information to understand you as a client, your objectives and to begin designing.

As the design process begins, it is easy to get caught up in design decisions of layout, features and content but know that this can slow down the entire web development process dramatically. The area of concentration for clients should be on the wireframe of the website. When you are coming up with great organization and hierarchy, you will find that this will increase conversion rates and lead more visitors to the most relevant areas on your website.

As web designers, it has become our responsibility to accommodate every web user out there and deliver them the best web experience possible. The concept and approach that responsive design suggests is that design and development should respond to the user’s behavior and device based on the platform and screen size.

Of course, the number of web-accessible devices are impossible to keep up with, and its crazy to try to design and code for each and every device available.

To practice responsive website development efficiently, would be to automatically respond to every user’s preference whether it be a laptop or iPad. This can be done by using CSS media queries and a series of flexible components, fluid grids and layouts that the website would have the capability to switch to optimize for any resolution or windows.

This presents a whole new way of thinking about design. A few years ago, it was almost impossible to devise ways to be extremely flexible in design, like we need to now. Solutions have come up and workarounds have allowed us to design without ever breaking images or layouts. A number of techniques have surfaced that address the issue of creating fluid websites. Check out “Flexible Web Design: Creating Liquid and Elastic Layouts with CSS” by Zoe Mickley Gillenwater.

The bottom line is that we are headed into a new age of web design and development and there is no time to design for every device, so we must begin to practice responsive web design for all users, allowing for old laptops as well as the newest trendiest gadgets on the market to create a great experience for all.