My business is internet based and through Business alliances have the opportunity to grow my company globally.

Quite a few agents are very lazy when writing the scripts for their clients listings and the presentations of the properties are extremely ill informed.

I am presently having a new website designed which will have the latest technology online as it important to keep on attracting new clients with a new shopfront.

I believe that presentation is important when advertising a property and more agents should spend the time in showing the features of the property for the benefit of the purchaser.

Just too quickly make it clear on your first note about the agent

Thought I would check our stats regarding landing pages other than the homepage…

All Visitors
Over 75% of all visitors enter through a landing page other than the home page and 39.5% are repeat visitors

Direct Visitors -
Just 29% enter through a landing page other than the home page and 59.5% are returning visitors

Search Engines – Google, Yahoo etc etc
A huge 76% enter through a landing page other than the home page and 23% are returning visitors

Referring Sites – Real Estate Directories and other websites
54% enter through a landing page other than the home page and 20.5% are returning visitors

The returning visitors is based on a one month period.

A bit generalised but this shows that the search engines are the cause of most landing pages inside a site and if they return they normally come back through the front door. If you are getting good visitor numbers from the search engines and your site navigation is not setup to capture that traffic you are wasting plenty of opportunity. Since January this year Search Engines have been delivering 47% of our traffic which is up (along with our total traffic) from last year.

I checked on the website you mentioned and it is being worked on. Those problems are temporary and are being sorted at the moment.

I’d love to ask a question about your post. You say one’s website is a virtual shopfront, which I agree with. I’d even say that, as shopfronts, websites are becoming less and less “virtual” by the month.

My question is, now that it seems more and more browsers are first landing on interior pages rather than on the home page, what does that mean for web design?

Do interior pages have to be different than they used to so that those people who arrive on them stay longer?

Be well.

In the print media, it’s the newspaper sales rep who gets the stick if the page prints poorly or the community newspaper isn’t delivered properly, etc. Online, it is entirely the agents responsibility to make sure that their web page works and your closing advice (“You do not want your website to be placed in the too hard basket; it should be one of the tasks you give priority to.”) is perhaps the most important message of all.

Thanks for the positive feedback and yes the developers should take some credit for their good work but equally i think the agent should take some as well.

I actually called and emailed that agent this morning to see if they were aware of the issue; i knowi would want to know, they were surprised to say the least and went into immediate action to fix the problem.

I know errors can occur; we have all found them and thought…oops! The above ‘extreme example’ only reinforces the point to me about managing sites better, adjusting focus to run the website with more emphasis on it being a dollar productive department.

In speaking with agents I often ask them what they think is the 5 most important aspects of their business, around 8 out of 10 put the website way at the bottom of the list, Justifiably this is attributed to their focus on what they consider to be dollar productive activities – listings, sales, training etc. My goal is to have them adjust their thinking slightly to include their website in that list, i know they will greatly benefit!

Craig Honeyman

As to that agent’s site and it stuffing up that seems to be their webdesigner which is the REA’s design team stuffing up and it the same for every one of their offices.

It seems that REA have created a new website but the old address have not been redirected properly. The address for each office is now not a static address but a dynamic address like http://agents.realestate.com.au/cgi-bin/cs/run.pl?_t=Search&_c=XJK&t=res&st_Agent=XJKTLA

So REA now gets his traffic attributed to him!!! All this on the same day I get their latest stats claiming how much more traffic they are getting

Basically the agent just lost every bit of search engine credit he had collected on those domains. The designers should have have included a url rewrite of the static address to the dynamic address.

The least they could have done was a 301 redirect so they could have kept any traffic they were generating from the old site to the new site, especially the search engine traffic.

Because the web designers left enough code in those old directories you can at least find their real site from the dropdown box but I doubt most people would continue browsing, choosing to hit back instead.

This sort of thing happens quite a lot by web designers who dont think of the big picture. Whenever you redesign a website and change the file and directory structure you must check all your landing pages and make allowances for every part of that traffic such as 301 redirects.