As a Real Estate agent, you have an unbelievably large number of choices for building your website. In this post I will give you my top five reasons why you should consider choosing a web designer who uses WordPress.

1. Highly adaptable to your needs. Without having to know any code, WordPress can be extended to do things like improved search engine optimization (SEO), create a site map, add contact forms, add a user interface for easily presenting and managing your listings, pull data directly from IDX feeds and more.

2. Easy to update content. There’s nothing worse than stale content on your site. With WordPress you don’t have any excuses. WordPress offers a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSWIG) interface, easy media management, built-in image editing. Widgets let you add content or code to just about anywhere in the design.

3. Widely Used. The latest major release of WordPress is version 2.9. It was released on December 18th, 2009 and as of this writing has been downloaded over 3,022,000 times. Over all it’s powering more than 202 million sites as of September 2009*. That means if you have a problem, youi’re almost certain to find someone who can help.

4. WordPress is a Content Management System (CMS). You may have heard that WordPress is just for blogging. However, the last several versions have made it practical to build any type of site, including sites that have a static home page. The fact that WordPress IS an excellent blog platform is a big plus though, since Google and other search engines love blogs.

Being a CMS basically means that your content is separate from the design, called themes by WordPress. This leaves you free to worry about writing content without being concerned about causing problems with your web design.

5. Open source and built on open source code. The last thing you want is to invest a lot of time in a proprietary system. Building your site on WordPress means maximum flexibility for your data. At it’s core, WordPress is built on PHP and MySQL, the most popular building blocks on the ‘Net.

So there you have it. Five reasons that WordPress should be powering your Real Estate website.

As easy as WordPress is to use, when it gets right down to it, managing a website is still a “geeky” process. By that I just mean that you can expect
a learning curve.

To address this issue, an entire industry has sprung up in the last two or three years offering premium WordPress Themes. These themes have additional features that make aspects of being a webmaster a lot nicer.

My favorite premium themes are developed by iThemes Media. If you hire me to design your real estate website, you will get a site based on an iThemes theme. Here’s an example. Some of their standard features include a menu builder, easy featured content management and several custom plugins that have been developed to address problems that their customers like you have had in the past.

Contact us today and find out how a WordPress solution can give you the edge in your market area.

*Source: Wikipedia.org