What makes a good web theme? What makes good visual representations of a real estate company? What is the general mood of the real estate company that you’re creating a web presence for? Once you have those three questions answered, you can realistically and logically begin to choose the right web theme for your particular real estate site, knowing that you at least have a target in mind.
And some of the separate concepts that go into that theme are ideas like creating a clean grid, making a personality-oriented site, working specifically toward a niche audience, choosing colors wisely, and going for a big or intimate presentation format. Each of these concepts will help you to create a more concrete vision for the web development that you’ll be putting together as a designer.
The Clean Grid
With real estate sites, there are probably going to be lots of house listings, and you’ll want to align those house images as cleanly as possible for people browsing the site. You’ll have to use the right combination of white space, color, font choice, and overall cohesiveness. Nothing looks worse that uneven lines, bad flow, or text that is hard to read or jammed together. And specifically when dealing with something as list-oriented as home listings, that’s one of the primary things that you have to get right when it comes to display.
The Personality-Oriented
With regard to a personality-oriented website, if there’s a primary feeling that the owner of a small real estate company has, or even a primary feeling that an individual real estate agent has, you can incorporate those qualities into a web design. For a parallel, think of how lawyers or law firms present themselves with online design, highlighting their strengths through the use of visual elements. The same thing can be done with real-estate, though the power in question will be more about trust, family, connection and neighborhood more likely.
Niche Audience-Centric
And sometimes you want to design a site to appeal to a certain personality as well. For instance, if a neighborhood in a city is going through a gentrification process, it makes sense to really tweak the website presentation in a way that’s going to specifically appeal to that niche audience. So this method isn’t so much about the personality of the seller, as it is the personality of the buyer.
The Importance of Color
It’s impossible to underestimate the importance of the right web design color scheme. No matter how awesome your real estate site is, and how amazing the people are, and how stellar the service is, if you decorate the main site with garish or off-putting colors, you’ll get a terrible response to your efforts.
Going Big, or Going Intimate
And finally, early in your decision of which way you want the site to go, decide if you are going for the feeling of the company in question being big, corporate, professional, and slick; or more intimate and familiar. Subtle clues in the website design will tell potential clients a lot about who they’re dealing with.