When your prospects come to your website, they already have specific goals in mind. It’s your job to anticipate what your prospects are looking for and make it as easy as possible for them to find what they need. For instance, those goals may be to:

• Find out what homes in their neighborhood are selling for
• Learn more about a home they saw in a particular neighborhood
• Find out local real estate information
• Find a real estate agent to help them sell their home
• Find out the specific times of an open house
• Download your free report on buying a home with a small down payment

Of course, you can’t possibly know what everyone who comes to your website is looking for. Instead, you focus on those things your target audience is looking for – after all, they are the ones you want to motivate to eventually call you!

How can you make your site easy to use?

• Focus on your user. Put yourself in your prospect’s shoes. How would you navigate the website? Would you be using a 23″ monitor or a PDA? Are you on dial-up or broadband? What features do you want to see? How easily can you get to those features from the home page?
  
  
• Don’t reinvent the wheel. Your prospects expect a specific type of layout when they visit any website. They expect to look in the top left for your logo. They expect your site’s navigation to be displayed prominently across the top or on the left side. And they expect the bulk of your content to be in the center of the page. When you deviate from this, you confuse your readers. They now have to reorient themselves and possibly even learn a new navigation system. If your prospects can’t figure out how to navigate your site in a few seconds, they leave – so stick with conventions.
  
  
• Be clear. Your readers don’t have the time to figure out what you mean. If they don’t understand what you’re trying to say or don’t understand your menu options, they probably won’t stick around long enough to learn more. Your readers want easy access to information without long-winded diatribes or jargon. Tell them exactly what they need to know.
  
  
• The devil is in the details. Details mean everything. If your links don’t work, your text has typos and grammatical errors, or your page simply looks cluttered, you don’t look professional.
  
  
• Make your text readable. Small text may look better from a design standpoint, but almost no one reads tiny text. Your web copy is what sells your services. If your prospects can’t read it – because it’s too small, too light, or clashes with your background color – they’ll quickly lose interest in your site and leave.
  
  
• Test! It’s not enough to simply build a site. You must also test it on an ongoing basis. How are your visitors actually using your website as compared with how you thought they’d be using it?

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