Website Beauty is Only Screen Deep

As the Internet and technology continues to expand there are literally thousands of ‘website designers’ with a wide range of knowledge, design and development skills. Most of the website designers have graphics design backgrounds, they make things pretty without much understanding of how a website should work, flow or ranks on a Search Engine. Beauty is only screen deep means that a beautiful website, maybe your beautiful website is only truly beautiful if the world is able to locate and view it outside of where you see the website on your screen.

The misinformed website companies or Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts who believe that a website needs SEO after it was completed or that old websites can have SEO work ‘added’ are selling snake oil not results. SEO is not something a true Search Engine Optimization expert does, it is an ongoing limitless method of backend website coding, formatting website content properly, link weight, directory insertions, manual ongoing submissions of webpages and so much more. Everyone claims to ‘do SEO‘ or Search Engine Marketing (SEM) yet very few truly understand what that really means or how to accomplish anything past adding META Tags to the website. The results speak for themselves when customers have had pretty websites built by other website companies who ‘do SEO‘ only to find none of the websites are being found on Yahoo or Google as expected. One such Kansas City Builder/Developer had been using a local website company who even outlined in the website agreement that SEO was included yet after the website went live it never showed up anywhere even when searching by the company name.

After two websites were produced Johnnie Adams Homes http://www.johnnieadamshomes.com/ hired Builder Consulting to redevelop the community websites and a new development/building company website. The investment spent with the other design company was lost yet the results from having all four of the new websites built properly were clear within weeks. All of the new websites are listed on the 1st page of Google, Yahoo and MSN when searching by name, location, product or community reaching thousands of buyers every month. The old website designed by the former website design company actually won Best Community Website Award yet it never once reached a buyer or helped sell a home because it could not be found online! Beauty is only screen deep, a website should be cosmetically pleasing yet balanced with the tools, code and true Search Engine Optimization to ensure the pretty website is a pretty selling tool.

Anyone can create or copy a pretty website, the cosmetic portion is the easiest to produce but the backend toold, content management systems, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems and code structure makes the website successful. Do the research to find companies with real estate experiance (not just selling websites to real estate, someone involved who understands the industry, customers, MLS, etc) and better yet locate a website design company who knows how the Internet workd AND how to build websites because that is the only way to be successful online.

Robert ‘Dot Com’ Jackson
http://www.builderconsulting.com
http://www.WebsitesForBuilders.com
http://www.builderwebsitedesigns.com
913-814-8844 Office

Building Better Websites for Home Buyers

Having been in business for over 12 years building over 600 websites nationally we have had numerous customers request music, audio and video to automatically play on their websites. While many website design companies do this without thought (the customer asked for it) few consider the problems this will cause the customer. Statistically speaking having music or video automatically start on websites will lose business since the large majority of Internet Users consider it annoying.

Technically having music or video on a website will keep 58% of all potential home buyers from ever viewing your website since they are still using Dial-up internet connections which cannot properly facilitate this. Many website designers fail to focus on what their customers customer is looking for when creating a home builder website nor the technical numbers.

Home buyers want a visually and cosmetically appealing website that downloads fast and is easy to navigate so they can find a new home. Anything else is a distraction that loses the customer and the potential sale on a real estate website. When Internet Users want to be entertained they visit www.YouTube.com and even that website does not automatically play music or videos until the customer requests!

The overwhelming majority of home buyers who visit your website are doing so at their office during the week. Considering this fact most of the home buyers who visit a website at the office that starts playing music from their work computer will instantly turn the website off so not to be caught. Builder Consulting spends between 20-30 hours a week (myself and our Internet Marketing staff) researching online usage trends, technical changes, home buyer studies and Search Engines to ensure the websites we build produce the proper results for the customer.

Below are a few articles and feedback on the use of audio/video on websites:

Business Community comments and information about music on websites:
www.startupnation.com/pages/community/forum_posts_SEO.asp?TID=322&PN=4&TPN=1

Nifty new service from Yahoo enables consumers to provide direct feedback and answers to questions such as music on websites:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070113153650AABqZMz

What other website companies say about music on websites:
http://www.oakridgewebdesigns.com/musicweb.htm

Robert ‘Dot Com’ Jackson
http://www.BuilderConsulting.com
913-814-8844 Office