Commandment 1 - Thou shall change content on a regular basis. This is first and for good reason. You must change and update your pages regularly. It shows that you are still in business and that you care enough about your visitors to put effort into your site. Yvette's site does this with her "advice" section. Every month she writes an article of interest to her visitors. Since people know that new content is coming, odds are they'll bookmark the site and return.
Commandment 2 - Thou shall provide valuable information. This was accomplished in two ways. First the "tour" of Northern Virginia and second the "advice" section again. Both of these sections provide information not available on any other site in the area. Help yourself by helping others. Most people will call the Realtor® who has helped them rather than someone who has not.
Commandment 3 - Thou shall look professional. You wouldn't dream of meeting a client wearing Bermuda shorts and a tank top would you? Of course not! Yet most Realtor's® sites do just that. Don't fall into the trap of making your site "cool." Cool sites are not necessarily good or effective. What you need is a site which conveys your professionalism and encourages people to call you. Do you think Yvette is professional now?
Commandment 4 - Thou shall make your site easy to navigate. If your visitors get lost within your site, they'll leave. It's that simple. Notice on the sub-pages of Yvette's site how you can always tell where you are in two ways. First, the upper left hand corner shows you visually how deep you're into the site and provides a way back home. Secondly, the bottom of every page again shows where you're at by having a "sharp" picture representing which section you're in and "blurred" pictures representing the other sections of the site. Can you figure out where you're at on her site?
Commandment 5 - Thou shall use professional quality graphics. Too often stock clipart pictures are used to "spruce up" a site. The result is just the opposite. The site's quality goes down. Professional graphics are not cheap but they're worth every penny. If you're not artistically inclined don't do them yourself. The money you save will be peanuts compared to the money you'll lose in the form of customers.
Commandment 6 - Thou shall use high quality fonts. The written word is powerful. The written word with a high quality font is even more powerful. Take a look at any well designed site and at its' heart will be great typography. The fonts used on your site help convey who you are and what you're about. If your site is filled with Arial, Times and Helvetica you look like everyone else. Is that the image you want?
Commandment 7 - Thou page shall download quickly. Great graphics, fonts and content are super, but if they take forever to download nobody will appreciate them. Most images can easily be reduced in size thereby increasing the speed which they load. So why isn't this done more often? Two reasons. Laziness or lack of knowledge. Yvette's main page utilizes an interesting trick called the "low res - high res swap." This trick uses a very small, fast loading picture which initially takes the place of a higher resolution picture which is downloaded later. Check it out yourself and see if your site can take advantage of this trick.
Commandment 8 - Thou forms shall look nice. Forms are ugly. Professional designers hate designing them. Why? Because it's hard to layout an effective form. The trick is to use a table (with the border off - remember chartjunk?) to layout the form elements. Take a look at the before and after. Which one would you be more willing to fill out?
Commandment 9 - Thou site shall be designed for the masses. By this, I mean your site should be designed so that most people can view it normally. There are actually hundreds of sub-commandments here to follow. Unfortunately, I can't list them all at this time. There is one classic problem which bears mentioning. The "best viewed with 800 x 600 resolution" suggestion. I agree that the site looks better if you follow this suggestion, but nobody will change their browser to fit your needs. In fact, most people won't even know what you're talking about. Notice how Yvette's new site works no matter what screen resolution you have. Isn't that a much better solution?
Commandment 10 - Thou shall have a memorable site. Will people who visit your site remember what it looked like? If it's done correctly they will. The question is, "How do you do that?" Actually it's easy. Just follow all these commandments your site will stand out from the rest and people will remember it. There are, of course, other techniques to help the memorability of your site, but I'll save them for my next article.
