Is Your Real Estate Website A Ghost Town?


by Richard Embro-Pantalony - Date: 2006-11-11 - Word Count: 669 Share This!

One of the bigger problems with having an online presence particularly in the real estate industry today is the lack of sustained maintenance of many websites. Either you don't have the time to update your website with new, fresh content or you don't realize the value of having fresh content on your website. Whatever the case is you can solve this problem for the most part by installing content manage system (CMS) when you build your website.

CMS allows you to maintain your website yourself with ease. Many CMS packages are very user friendly and feature WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editors. If you can work with MS Word documents you can easily change the content of your website regularly. Some claim to be as easy to work with as sending an email.

While this is true in some cases you need to be careful when making a purchase of this software. First of all it can be expensive to install into an existing website if not impossibly difficult. This means that many companies prefer to sell you an entire new website with the CMS feature already built in. When you consider what it costs to have someone do the updating for you and perhaps what you lose in business by not updating your website regularly, a new website may be the way to go.

CMS websites come with many features that you may wish you had such as emailing and list manage tools, dynamic image and graphic upload with editing features built in. Search engine marketing capabilities are also built in on many systems and for my money this is a requirement. The ability to just change the body text in your site to keep it fresh is a good thing but these systems can do so much more.

Of course you get what you pay for like anything else and CMS is no different. I've seen CMS packages range in price from $299.00 US to as high as $50,000.00 for corporate sites and I wasn't really drilling to deep in my search for price comparisons. Of course price varies because of the different features you want and the type of management you intend to use it for. CMS is available for both Internet and Intranet or both. The number of administrative users is important for price and some require added monthly fees or licensing rights for their use.

For the realtors out there who want to improve their web presence the prices can be fairly reasonable. I've found great systems for an individual agent site ranging from $299.00 to about $3500.00. The difference in performance was really not that much different between the two and generally had to do with value added features such as installing plug and play applications for more functionality. Of course these companies will try and sell their additional features to you quite aggressively but buyers beware.

Make sure you shop around just as aggressively yourself. Most if not all of these companies will provide you with an online demo so you can test drive the CMS package to determine its value to you. I found that what may appear at first to be an exciting feature probably would become mundane after the novelty wears out. Look for scalability in your CMS. Make sure you can upgrade as your needs change going forward.

Decide in advance what you want this CMS to do for you and if it doesn't meet your requirements move on. If you feel under whelmed by the demo this is a sure sign that you need to keep looking. Eventually you will find something that has everything you want with the ability to add to it over time and is the right price. Free technical support for at least 60 days is imperative and a paid customizing capability from the company would be nice as well.

Richard Embro-Pantalony is the Publisher of http://www.profitingbig.com. Realtors MUST READ his book - "Profiting Big With Your Real Estate Website"


Related Tags: websites, real estate websites, real estate marketing, real estate agents, realtors, real estate software, real estate brokers, real estate internet mar

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