Linda's Line - Mar '08

IT'S MY 1ST WEBSITE! WHAT SHOULD I DO FIRST?

It's time to do your first website. Where do I start? What should I do first? As with most things in life, a little planning goes a long way toward making the process less painful!
Think of a domain name as something similar to a logo or slogan for your business. When you choose your domain name it should be something that represents your business and how you want your business (you) to be seen by the world. You also should consider your target audience. Just as magazines target different population demographics, your website and domain name together can target a specific demographic. Think about who your customers are and have been over the years and who you want to attract as customers now. That would be the demographic or age group or type of customer that you want to go after. Once you have all of these things in mind and with that knowledge in hand start looking at different words that can best represent you and what you are trying to accomplish business wise with your website.
Once you have some names in mind, you can go to http://www.godaddy.com/ and check to see if the name you have in mind is already taken or not. If it is available, buy it. You need to have this under your control so that no other can hold your business image hostage. The next issue is money. What kind of a budget do you have for getting your website created and then maintaining it long term? How much time do you have to put into maintaining the information on your site? Do you have the patience with to "do-it-yourself?" Only you can answer these questions. Then you can decide how you want to proceed with getting your website built and by whom.
I would say an example of one of the better business names put together for real estate is probably RE/MAX. Any way you look at it, this company name represents a positive image of real estate to John Q. Public. Now combine that with the company logo, the RE/MAX balloon in red, white and blue is easily one of the most recognized national company name/symbol in the real estate world. A darn near perfect marriage of everything good advertising tries to accomplish. Prudential has "the ROCK" as its symbol which represents the Plymouth Rock where our forefathers landed in the Mayflower. Century 21 is taking you into the 21st Century, another great example of the name/slogan marriage in business marketing. And so on and so forth!
An example of a great agent real estate website/domain is Alice Held from Arizona. Her website, http://www.come2az.com/ if chock full of great information for her customers! Alice's website is a lot more complex than you see on the surface. It is very heavy in content she has gathered. Each of the links you see on her home page lead to other pages on her website. She uses her "home page" much like a table of contents in a book and all of the southwestern style graphics and Saguaro cactus characters capture her customers interest and entice them to spend more time looking at her site. To have a site similar to hers, without copying her and infringing on her copyright will require much time, thought and creative writing on your part to accomplish. If you expect someone else to write the content for you, then you will need to hire a company that does everything, design, copy writing, publishing, hosting and promotion. Here are some of the things you need to do to create a site similar to Alice's:

ulead people to your website by choosing great key words geared toward your site and advertising on the search engines in addition to that.
ukeep people on your site long enough to become so interested that they will come back again and again.
give them long term value (informational things and frequent changes to the website) that will be of interest long after you have sold them because satisfied customers will lead others to you so the longer you can keep them coming back to your site the more people they will bring in with them.
uput your best sales pitch on paper and flesh it out with pictures, cartoons, graphics, advice, area information, schools information or links, virtually everything you can think of that a customer might ask about.