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.

We cranked out a few unique sites the last few months this year to end this year with a new record of new websites! January we’ll have even more to add to our portfolio.

Hunter Homes – Alabama

Hunter builds new homes in northern Alabama that offers a wide variety of choices for the buyer and puts the homebuyer in the driver’s seat when it comes to purchasing their new home.

 Norfolk Homes – Michigan, Tennessee, Alabama

Norfolk Homes is a growing builder that has divisions in 3 states and offers unique home building and home buying promotions for their home buyers.

Maui Nui Marine Resource Council

This is one of Builder Designs non-home builder websites that is really nice. The site is built around the Maui Nui Marine Council and how they are preserving and helping save Hawaii’s most precious resources as well as getting the word out.

As web designers, we spend countless hours on focusing what the client’s objectives are, brand appearance, the customer’s needs, as well as all the page layouts, navigation and functionality of the website. Given all the wonderful design tools, its really the content of all of the pages that is the key to success. The website is only as good as its content. Its what conveys the message, boosts online presence and traffic. Here are some tips to writing and preparing the best web copy for your website and what you should avoid.

Creating Convincing Copy

Be personable. No one wants to feel pressured when they visit a website. Keep your copy personal and relaxed throughout the site. Simply putting your photo on the About page won’t be enough to convey your company’s personality. Don’t write in 3^rd person or like you’re reciting from Wikipedia. Reach your audience by speaking directly to them and find a way to connect by sharing or relating personal experiences. Be convincing by telling them what you can do for them.

Enrich your Writing. Using keywords in your copy is necessary if you want to draw a crowd and the right web visitors to your site. SEO enriched copy is key. Keywords are not hard to use, just ask yourself what words would you use to find your site? Use them throughout every page but do not overuse them or you will sound spammy or too forceful.

Use Different Text Lengths. Web users want information fast and usually will scan a page quickly. Your copy should include short bursts of text or headlines that stand out to the reader and will make them stop and read or go back and read the smaller text if its what they’re looking for.

Avoid Writing Offending Copy

Don’t be an Ego-maniac. Self centered web copy that is full of ‘we’s’ good practice for marketing and selling your products. Web users don’t really care about the company, they only care about what you can do for them. Your company values and commitments may be important, just relate it to the customer.

Don’t be a Blabbermouth. Long, drawn out web copy is just daunting & boring and it makes people want to leave. Keep it short and simple using key words and messages that get to the point. The website will be able to communicate much easier and quicker to visitors.

Don’t Scream. It may seem that writing copy that is full of hype, written in bold, all-caps will get the attention of your visitors. Not true. Visitors want helpful and informative content that isn’t all in their faces.  You want to express a message that gives reasons why they should be interested and back up your claim.

Combining  good website design with good web copy on your website will prove to be a very powerful tool and result in happy customers ready to do business with you.

When beginning to design a new website for consumers, or when evaluating your existing site, it is important that it has a unique quality and emotion that influences the user and reflects your brand. Giving a website a personality greatly influences decision-making on part of the user and can be a very powerful tool. Products are people too!

Often called Interface design, Human-Computer Interaction is where all the elements of computer science, behavioral science and design come together. They influence the user through emotion the way two people would interact. What’s interesting is that when done right, the personality of the product will override the computer’s inanimate coldness.

It is extremely important to know your audience and what makes people interested in your product. If you’re trying to sell homes, the website must be “trustworthy” and convey an openness as if they were stepping into one of your model show homes. Its true that many people with the idea of buying a new home will look online first, and your website must be invite them in, and offer them all the information that they are seeking instantly, or these “browsers” will go elsewhere.

Get involved in the design process with the web designers and make sure that they understand what really drives your customers and how your brand is important so they can bring it to life. Many times over, the designers will know how the architecture or “ bare bones” of the site should be orchestrated, to enhance a user’s experience and get them to information quickly.

Only when you are comfortable and knowledgeable of your brand’s influence on your customers, will you be able to create a powerful website full of personality that will meet people face-to-face and overall, win their trust. Its is very important to great customer service and an online sales person that will continue to embody the same brand persona and guide them to the next step of purchasing a home or product. Most importantly, if you don’t respond to them in a timely fashion, you could lose that person and bond you created online. Remember to follow up!

Google Analytics can help you keep track of how users interact with your website or app using their phones. You can use it to track the following:
User activity on your mobile website.
All the same data that you’ve come to expect from your Google Analytics reports is now available for mobile websites. Simply paste our server-side code snippets on each page you wish to track. Google Analytics then creates a profile for your mobile website, where you can view the same kind of information that’s in standard Analytics reports, like visitor information and traffic sources. You’ll be able to track users visiting your mobile website from both smartphones (like iPhones and Android devices) and WAP devices.

We’ve tested the server-side snippets in the following environments:
* PHP 5
* JSP on Jetty 6
* Perl 5.10
* ASP.NET on IIS 6.0
Users accessing your regular website from their high-end mobile device You can use Google Analytics to track traffic to your regular website that comes from high-end mobile devices like iPhones, Android devices, and the Palm Pre. All traffic from high-end mobile devices can be viewed by device or carrier under the ‘Visitors’ section in the ‘Mobile’ tab of your Analytics account, or in the ‘Mobile advanced’ section.

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.

Builder Designs is proud to announce, Regal Builders in Savannah, GA and Tommy Huelskamp LLC in Edmond, OK who launched their first websites this week.

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.