The Anatomy of a Perfect Real Estate Wordpress Blog - Part 1

Before we get started, let me disclose that I am biased: I worked with Janie and Shelly on The Coral Gables Story - in a personal role, not in my role at RealBird - but nevertheless, I truly believe that their recently released site is one of the best real estate blogs out there. After my analyses in Part 2 of this two parts series - with Janie's and Shelly's permission - I am going to share some powerful WordPress customization tips. Stay tuned via our RSS feed Part 2 wil follow in a few days. 

Concept, context and the vision

The Coral Gables Story is a real estate blog: their primary goal is to generate revenue from real estate sales activities, but they also wanted to create a site that goes beyond "just" real estate content and engages the community on a longer term, not just while people actively seeking a home to buy or planning to sell. The site is very much location centric, just like real estate itself, but it creates a mix of content that ventures out to other areas, more specifically, content about things that are the other passions of Janie and Shelly: history, coffee and social activities (e.g. local events). Working with them, I know for sure, that they started the whole development process by first identifying and refining their concept, their content mix and the overall vision. The whole Story concept is very innovative, social and inviting. They actively seek stories from local businesses, residents and visitors to their city and they launched with a few stories already posted. Here is an example post: Memories of Family Vacations from DE that brought a Family to Coral Gables

What's important to emphasize here is that the concept and the context that glues these different topics together clearly defines the vision. Once defined, the vision made them focused during the whole process and importantly, it is instantly clear for the blog visitors as well. They also posted this featured article ( Just what is The Coral Gables Story all about? ) that clearly communicates the concept and the vision to first time visitors.

Actionable things that can be learned here:

• Define your concept, context and the vision - it will keep you focused for the long run
• Create a content mix documentation  - find the verticals and niches that are your passions besides real estate, write them down in a spreadsheet and try to come up with the percentage of content each niche will generate. You should be able to generate a pie chart of your content mix. Again, this will keep you on track for the long run. It does not have to be complicated, in the case of The Coral Gables Story, a list of main categories such as "Real estate", "Coffee", "History", "Events", "Your Story" did the magic. Once documented, it could be easily decided how much content for each category they wanted to and can actually create ongoing.
• Iterate until the concept and content mix is in the perfect context of your overall goal: i.e. to generate real estate business

Design, branding and execution

Because I was involved from inception through launch, I know it for a fact, that the design went through many iterations. Janie and Shelly had a vision from the beginning and the functional design and the graphics design went hand-in-hand to create the final product.

In March, the site was almost ready to launch, but after some internal debates about the colors and typography and based on the feedback from others, they decided to go through one more large iteration and they changed the overall color theme and design elements, once again. It was a big decision, because they've already invested months of work in the first design, but for the very same reason - due to all the investment in time - they wanted to make it right at the launch.

Their vision also suggested that they need an overall design that is brand-able and functional. One that they can use as an overall branding vehicle on business stationaries, T-shirts, merchandise etc. and one that supports online applications as well including online marketing such as SEO, social media marketing etc.

After all the efforts, they got it right. Here is what I like the most:

• Overall color theme - solid, easy on the eye, unique overall design (brown and green) and the colorful thumbnails and featured posts add enough spice to keep it exciting on subsequent visits
• Highly emphasized call-for-action buttons - great functional design example. It's above the fold and drives visitors toward valuable actions 
• Homepage layout: I love that the large photo slider of their niche communities and real estate verticals are highlighted for new visitors. Many new visitors arrive to the homepage first or if not, check it out at least once during their visit. It's crucial to have a homepage that makes the vision obvious and intuitive. On the other hand, visitors through search engines and returning visitors via RSS will end up on the individual posts. The website is designed in a way that it provides slightly different landing page, content for new vs. returning visitors. Very smart design for maximizing the engagement

Actionable things that can be learned here:

• Understand the many faces of design:  graphics design, functional design and branding. Make sure they work together well and support each other
• Take your time: Design, branding and proper execution takes time and many iterations. 
• Hire a designer: Creative process is a very subjective matter, but then there are many objective things involved. Professionals know typography, colors, layouts and what's doable and what's not to tie graphics, functionality and brand together.
• Get feedback from peers and different people around you.You don't have to change your idea to accomodate every bit of feedback but you may get inspired by outsiders.

Janie's and Shelly's diligence in design, execution and attention to details paid off. Thesis theme founder Chris Pearson found their blog on his own and tweeted about it to his 9000+ followers. See the screenshot of his status update below.

Pretty neat, isn't it?

UP NEXT: Features and usability and hands-on technical tricks and tips in Part 2

I wanted to keep this post reasonably short. In Part 2, I will explore the Features and Usability aspect of The Coral Gables Story and will also provide hands-on, technical details about some of the Wordpress plugins that Janie and Shelly used and also details about the RealBird integrations.

If you like what you've seen so far, just click the *Like* button below and let them know

Stay tuned for Part 2. Thanks !

-- Zoltan 
RealBird.com

 

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