Staging Your Website

Take a moment to think of your real estate agent website and envision it as a home that you are about to list. Go through each page on your website as you would each room of a home. Identify the selling points, as well as, the low points.

There are many similarities between a home for sale and a real estate agent website. I think the most important commonality is that of the effective use of negative space, known as whitespace in the web design world.

If you, as a real estate agent, go to list a home, do you not make suggestions to the homeowner on how to make the home look more appealing? If a room is full of clutter, knick-knacks and too much furniture, do you suggest that items be placed in storage while the home is listed? The goal is to make the space to appear larger and more inviting.

It has always puzzled me why so many real estate professionals who understand the concept of layout for a home break all of those same rules on their websites. So many real estate agent websites are crammed full of content, images and widgets that they feel cluttered, cramped and disorganized. Much like a home before it is professionally staged.

Strategic use of empty space is inviting on a website, much as it is in a home. If you walked into a home and every square inch of the floor was covered, what feelings does that invoke? Could you focus on any one thing, or would you be so overwhelmed that you couldn’t focus on anything?

Use your home staging skills to identify is you have enough whitespace on each page of your website. Determine what adds value to the reader and what aids in your goal of converting that reader into a client. Everything else must go.

Think about it, are people coming to your real estate website because they need the weather widget on your homepage to tell them what the temperature is?

To learn about effectively using whitespace on your real estate website, read Website White Space and Give Me My Web Space. Both of these articles will help you to reach the optimal goal of 35% of your website containing absolutely nothing.