Design is more than just outside vanity. One of our mandates at BRIXWORK is to create beautiful Realtor® websites. Vanity is very real. Many traditional real estate sites lack focus on the beauty & visual elements, and we stepped into the real estate website market to change that. Sales is an emotional process; whether you are buying groceries, or a new home, the first impressions matter so much.
Success of Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram & Apple.. and more
Great visual impact has been one of the most important attributes for some of the most successful companies that rely on customer loyalty. And customer loyalty, referrals, and repeat business over many years is what can make the biggest difference to how successful your real estate business can be.
One of the greatest factors in Facebook edging out MySpace with so much ease was the simplicity & cleanliness of the design. MySpace users were given too much free reign to put too much colours, boxes, and ugly content all over their user profiles. In comparison, Facebook had a tight control over the layout & look of each page, and by having a good degree of restriction they managed to keep their website looking clean.
Apple was able to dominate the iPod market, squashing out the Zune MP3 player from Microsoft like a little bug. The simplicity of the design of the iPod with just a few buttons and a simple body was a clear winner. The iPads and iPhones are a similar story – simple clean designs, big screens for delivery of pictures & videos made it a clear winner in the smartphone & tablet market. Apple’s sales figures of the iPads are just enormous.
Pinterest & Instagram are one of the most successful new web start-ups. Pinterest is a visual-driven website where people simply pin up pictures & images they like. The fact that a photo-only social network is able to so easily dominate the social media start-up market is telling of how visually motivated people are. Instagram provides mobile apps that allow users to edit their photos for beautiful photo effects (colour tones, frames etc.) with ease. It seems visually stimulating things are the most popular and most engaging to the human brain.
Websites that try to say too much about itself, or the agent, is the real-life equivalent of the guy who never shuts up and keeps on talking, without giving the customer a chance to react, communicate and offer some space to talk. We strive to design websites with less clutter, more valuable content (pictures & videos specifically), and most of all, a trust-invoking design.
A New Blog Post on Mashable.com
Mashable, which is one of the best online magazines discussing marketing, business and technology, has released a great article recently – Why Great Design Is The Future Of Content Marketing. It’s worth a read. The article focuses on:
- The importance of easy & effective user interfaces on popular apps proving a success
- How interactive design with some effects is better than a static, boring website with no responsivenes
- Less is more when it comes to design
