[Slideshow] Responsive Design for Real Estate

Responsive Design for Real Estate: How to Choose a Mobile Theme that Drives Sales

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Why Use Responsive Design?

With more and more consumers searching for local businesses on their mobile devices, investing in a mobile presence is becoming increasingly important for real estate professionals. While three years ago you could get by with just a desktop website, today consumers expect a great browsing experience not only on their computers, but also on their tablets and smartphones.

Due to the wide variety of screen sizes and resolutions in the ever-growing mobile device market, optimizing for mobile has – until recently – seemed like a daunting task. Consequently, many real estate websites that looked and performed beautifully on a desktop monitor offered a lousy experience to mobile users.

Luckily, developers have come up with solutions to help companies provide a consistent and high-quality web browsing experience across all platforms. The most recent and promising of these is a set of practices known as Responsive Design.

The web version of Responsive Design for Real Estate:

Mobile has changed everything. Three years ago, most people were surfing the web from their lap- or desktops, and less than 20 percent of the top 500,000 websites were mobile friendly. Today, mobile friendly isn’t even enough: consumers expect a great browsing experience no matter what device they’re using. Responsive design promises users that experience.

The Numbers:

• Mobile is on pace to exceed desktop Internet traffic in 2014.
• 66% of Americans ages 24-35 own a smartphone. 29% of U.S. adults own a tablet or eReader.
• 98% of people believe mobile is either essential or helpful in the home search process.
• Mobile users are three times more likely than desktop users to contact a real estate professional following their search.
• 87% of marketers plan to increase emphasis on mobile in 2013, but most consider themselves novice or inexperienced in mobile marketing.

The Takeaway: The market is demanding mobile solutions from the real estate industry, but most real estate professionals aren’t sure how to implement mobile in their strategy. This is where RESPONSIVE DESIGN comes in.

WHAT IS RESPONSIVE DESIGN? Responsive Design is a web design approach that scales web content fluidly across multiple devices, creating an easy reading and navigation experience with a minimum of resizing or scrolling.

Responsive Design In Action: On a responsive design site, you’ll see subtle changes to images, text, navigation, and layout depending on which device you’re using to view it.

Benefits of Responsive Design:

• FLEXIBLE
• POWERFUL
• UNIVERSAL
• MODERN
• POPULAR

IS RESPONSIVE RIGHT FOR ME? Do you need a responsive website? How much of your site traffic comes from mobile devices? If it’s a lot, then you could be missing out on tons of leads. What’s your site content like? If it’s a mix of text (blog posts and listing descriptions) and visuals (property photos and videos), a responsive theme is the perfect solution.

Choosing a Responsive Theme: there are thousands of responsive design themes out there, with more being added every day. How do I choose the right one?

General Questions:

• Will it accommodate your custom branding and design elements?
• Does it address your customers’ feedback on your old site?
• Does it fit your site’s brand, tone, and content?
• How technologically advanced is it?

Mobile Questions:

• Will the colors and textures show up clearly?
• Are your site structure and navigation simple enough?
• Will it support media to entice mobile users?
• Will it support full-function search and lead capture forms?
• What can you fit above the fold?

To learn more about building your real estate website with responsive design, download our free Responsive Design for Real Estate eBook below.