Designing a real estate website takes time, patients, design skills, and an understanding of how to incorporate design into your promotional and SEO efforts. It’s not easy task. Just choosing the color scheme along can take days, and that’s one of the easier tasks.

You can’t look at real estate website design as a stand alone element. You need to think how it fits into your other needs such as SEO compatibility and page load time.

Page load time is an important element of design. The technology exists today to create a stunning website, with drag and drop features that allow the website user to control their experience, pick their preferred colors, talk through a webcam to a live representative, watch interesting flash presentations and videos and so on. However, the fact remains that design technologies have advanced much quicker than internet technologies. Therefore you need to ensure you balance the realities of both worlds. Building the most visually impressive website is a waste of time, if it take 9 minutes to load on the average users computer with a 56.6K dial up modem. And depending on which report you read, about 50% of the users visiting your site will be visiting with a dial up connection. Often people who work with design live in a world of T1 and DSL connection. Flash loads in a couple blinks of the eye and pictures load as quickly as text. However, if you hope not to alienate 50% of your website visitors you need to design while taking page load time into consideration.

So what is a good page load time? Well numbers exist which say you should try to make your page as small as possible, but good websites will usually make it in between 30k -50k. It also seems that search engines like these scaled backed, quick loading websites. A quick search on Google shows us that the top 10 searches had a page size of..

38K
44K
50K
35K
33K
28K
55K
35K
28K
27K

Now mind you, this only takes into consideration the HTML code on your website, but nevertheless, this still has huge design implications. You need to ensure your HTML code is clear of errors and scaled back to be search engine friendly and fast loading.

Google with its 6K HTML page is a great example of a scaled back website, but probably not realistic for a real estate website. Amazon.com is a little large at 73K and CNN is monstrous at 104K. It’s also about knowing your audience. Google is looking for global reach and wants to spread information to those who have the slowest internet access. CNN, on the other hand is a right of center media channel with a demographic that likely has high speed internet. As a real estate agent you can probably come to some conclusions about your website visitors as well. If they are looking for a 400,000 home, they probably also have the money to spend on a high speed internet connection meaning that a 6K main page is not necessary and you may sacrifice your design if you go that low.

How to check your page load time

To check your page size and load time please use the following tool

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

I hope this report has helped shed light on issues you were unsure about regarding real estate or travel website design. Everything from knowledge about navigation structures to picture formatting need to be understood before starting the design process to ensure that your website is as search engine friendly, user friendly, quick loading and compatible website. If you've ejoyed this article, you may be interested in learning more about our real estate website ebook which includes information on design built specifically with the real estate webmaster in mind. To learn more about this ebook click here.

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