Recently finished work on Blackbird Homes, a real estate company in St. Petersburg, Florida.   I used WordPress as the Content Management System  and the Homeowner Theme by Gorilla Themes. 

The theme design is very clean and organized, but I was mainly impressed with how well the theme integrated with WordPress.  You can add a listing as easily as you can add a blog post.  The categories are used heavily to create search functionality, organize properties and distinguish between listings and blog posts.

The theme is user-friendly, including several useful plugins and 5 different color templates to choose from.

I could have built the entire site without any coding, but did tweak a few things on the sidebar, cascading style sheet and header.

The support forum at Gorilla themes has a lot of good information, the documentation available was easy to read and they responded to questions quickly.

The theme is scalable to allow multiple agents to have their own logins, post their own listings and have them displayed along with their agent profile.

I recommend this as a powerful, functional solution to a real estate website.

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Keep It Simple, Stupid. One of the definitive characteristics of Web 2.0 is its simplicity of design.  The less is more approach applies in designing websites to compete in today’s market.

The old way was to fill up your pages with as much content as you could, letting people know that you were online and legitimate.  With the amount of websites and competition increasing exponentially today, your website has a limited amount of time to grab attention and accomplish a goal.

How long do you give a website before you go somewhere else?  2 seconds, 5 seconds, 10 seconds,  longer?  Seriously?

Forget the flash intros, background music, Adsense, widgets, gadgets and random pictures.   Keep your website  and posts minimal and clutter-free. A prospect should be able to look at your website and in 5 seconds know how to contact you or purchase a product.  Make sure you have a clear Call To Action.

A quick read, (really, I read it in under 2 hours)  is Seth Godin’s The Big Red Fez: How To Make Any Web Site Better.  His take is surfing on the web is like a monkey looking for a banana. Websites should be kept simple and easy for anyone to immediately identify what the site is about and quickly grab the banana.

For small business website design, contact thereferralgeneration

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Over on Search Engine Guide there is a definitive checklist for online marketing.  Definitely worth checking out.

The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist, Period! – Search Engine Guide Blog

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After spending a year and a half designing the website for my wife’s small business, I decided to delete the whole thing.

During those 18 months, I learned quite a bit about website design, search engine optimization and lead conversion.  Enough to confidently delete the website and start over with WordPress.

I had originally built the site with WebsiteTonight from Godaddy and although I was very pleased with how the site looked, there were too many advantages to converting it:

• I was able to have the blog and website all on one domain
• WordPress is the best blogging software
• The code for WordPress and frugaltheme is clean, fast and search engine friendly
• The on-page search engine optimization is built in
• I was able to install plugins to improve search rankings, such as All in one SEO Pack, Google XML sitemaps, Google Analytics for WordPress, and Yet another Related Posts
• It is easy to add new content
• Creation of categories and tags to improve search engine rankings
• Installed good-looking web 2.0 contact form for lead conversion
• Ability to interact, leave comments and subscribe to the site

The biggest obstacle is that you do not want your commercial business website to look like a blog.  I decided to go with frugaltheme because it is easily customizable and has a minimalist design.  I was able to create a static homepage and have the actual blog as the 4th page in.  The layout is very simple including a basic description, contact form and testimonials.  Take a look at how it turned out.

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photo by koka sexton

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