Picking out a theme to represent your business online is a difficult task. You need something that fits your unique style and is easy for visitors to find what they seek. Before you spend hours and possibly a lot of money on your website, prepare yourself. Here are some pitfalls to avoid when purchasing a real estate theme.
1) Incompatible Features
Real estate themes are sometimes built to work with a specific IDX service. You may fall in love with how the search works or how properties are displayed; however, it can be very disappointing to find out that your ideal layout will only work with a different IDX service. IDX, or Internet Data eXchange, is a generic term for real estate content shared over the Internet. Be very careful when choosing a theme to ensure that it is compatible for your specific IDX, lest all the features you paid for become worthless.
2) Upgrade Difficulties
Technology moves quickly. Software quickly becomes outdated or security leaks are found. You should expect the theme that you purchased to keep up. Make sure that you purchase a theme which allows for updates and is from a company that is stable enough to support those updates. You don’t want to invest in a theme only to have it fail you in a couple of months with no easy path to upgrade.
Besides updating the theme that you built, what happens when you want to change the look of your site? Nobody wants a stale site. Many themes have theme specific features that tie you into that theme. Changing themes can be both expensive and time consuming. You don’t want to have to rebuild your entire site any time you want to freshen up your website.
3) Avoid Bloat
When you buy a good theme that is built for real estate, it should not be bloated with features that you don’t need. Purchase only what you need to sell real estate and not slow down your site with frivolous features for a pet shop or online dating. The more plugins and unnecessary features that are installed, the slower your site will become. Be sure to get a theme which has the features that you require, but is still thin enough to run efficiently.
4) Low Standards
Even though something looks pretty on the demo, it doesn’t mean that this will perform well in the real world. Some discount themes ignore basic tenants of web development and are likely to fail. The theme may be set up in the demo with specific tweaks to work, but later may fail with additional plugins or configurations once installed on your site. Almost anyone can put together a theme that works in a specific environment, but make sure that the developer of the theme is highly rated and has experience to create a theme that will stand on it’s own in the real world.
Conclusion: Purchasing a Real Estate Theme
There are great real estate themes available; however, you need to know what to look for. Agent Evolution has created their own framework that is real estate specific. We don’t provide themes for restaurants or fitness clubs. Our specificity prevents bloat and allows us to focus on doing one thing and doing it correctly. Take a look at our demos and give our sales team a call now to get started on a real estate site that simply works.
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