TECHNOLOGY
Arriving on your site
Google your brand and branch name on the mobile browser, and follow the links to your own website. What does the landing page look like?
Does it load quickly? Is the text small? Are the images very small? Can you easily tap or click on links and buttons? Place yourself in the position of the mobile user. Is your landing page useful, usable and quick? Does it give you clear directions where you should go next? If not, you probably wouldn’t want to stick around. And neither will the 22 million other mobile users. Finding properties on your site
From the homepage of your website, try and search for properties in your area: How easy is this? Are there any fiddly bits that irritate you or confuse you? How hard is it to find your way around the search screens and the search results? Time how long it takes to reach one of your listed properties for sale and ask yourself if that would be a reasonable amount of time to spend navigating your site.
Finding your contact details
Now try and locate your contact details and telephone number on your own site. From the homepage and also from any page with property details on. Is that easy to find? See for yourself– an exercise
Google “Reading Agents” on your mobile. You should find at a least six or seven agents listed on the results page. Of these, some are well optimised for mobile, some are OK, and some not optimised at all. See if you can work it out which is which for yourself.
Which of these agents do you think is going to benefit the most from their mobile websites? Of these, Romans and Parkers (see
screengrab) in particular offer a really good mobile experience. Clean site design, big buttons, and access to all the essential functions. From the landing page, you can easily navigate the site and find what you are looking for, whether to buy, rent, sell or let property. These are GREAT examples of how mobile websites should look and behave. My site is not up to scratch, what should I do? If your site failed any of the above tests, ask your website developers to make your site mobile friendly, or to develop a bespoke mobile site for you. Both options are likely to be quite expensive, and will take some time. In the meantime, make sure you list
on a property portal with good mobile capabilities and a lot of mobile users.
USE HIGH QUALITY, CLUTTER FREE PHOTOS Thumbnails and photos are generally rendered to be quite small on mobile devices. Overly detailed photos with low contrast do not render well. Clear, high contrast images with less detail look much better. Look at the sample images taken from Rightmove’s mobile website. Which images do you think work best and would catch your eye as a home-hunter? Further, make sure your property
descriptions are short, concise, to the point and highlight the most attractive aspects of a property.
Left: Parkers’ mobile optimised website is an excellent example.
Right:
Rightmove mobile
thumbnails - Some photos work better in the thumbnail size.
PROPERTYdrum JANUARY 2012 37
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