softRealty.com Corporate Site Update :: Part II

In my last post I displayed some of the features of the latest update to the www.softRealty.com corporate website, as well as describing what features and pricing Search Connect consists of. In today’s post I want to go through a progression of the reasons why we did what we did.

Here is a screen shot of the former home page:

Former Home Page

and a screen shot of the new home page:

Home Page

The design is clean in the former home page but there is confusion in the product offerings. The distinction between Search Connect and Client Connect is muddled and there are multiple “Call to Action” buttons on the page. Instead of having two separate products on the same home page fighting for attention, we have condensed our presentation of our offerings into one product.

Focused Branding

In the new home page, we have dropped the idea of Client Connect and focused all of our efforts into branding Search Connect as an all in one software that can be upgraded to allow for optimal feature capability. The process for the agent is simplified because instead of signing up for free Search Connect and then subscribing to Client Connect separately, the agent will be able to just sign up for a free Search Connect account and then upgrade to the plan that works best for them.

“Get Your Free Account”

We have clearly defined the call to action “Get Your Free Account”. Our goal is to make the process easy for potential users of the Search Connect to get started. Throughout the site, visitors will find the call to action easy to access and supported by all the information they would need to make a decision on whether or not this product is right for them.

Textually Active

Another concern we had when reviewing the former home page was that there was a need to reduce the text on the page. The average user spends less than 30 seconds on a website, so it is critical to utilize a combination of visual and textual cues to keep them looking. We started out with lengthy amounts of text for each category of information and chopped that down to the most pertinent.

Visual Icons

The icons from the former home page were used throughout the application (Search Connect) and we didn’t want to redefine our iconology. We did want to give them some more mojo though, so we introduced a  new look and feel to the icons on the site. Specifically – Property Search, Simple CRM, and Lead Capture were given a more polished look.

Here are the Icons:

New Icons

I hope you enjoy the changes to the new site. We will be doing some massive email efforts in the following weeks to get the word out about Search Connect. If you are in the RE industry, please check us out. If you know people in the industry please pass the word along about our product.

Until next time.