Starting a rental website from scratch can be a curse and a blessing: It’s great to increase visibility to get more business, but it’s a pain to design, build and maintain one.
Seth Godin, author of Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable said, “I’m going to out on a limb and beg you not to create an original design. There are more than a billion pages on the web. Surely there’ son that you can start with? …Your car isn’t unique, and your house might not be either.”
It becomes difficult to choose a place to host your website with so many options available to you. Our preference is to choose a host that makes website building quick and painless. Use resources that involves elements that are predesigned, making your job easier. That’s why we recommend using WordPress as your publishing platform for your rental real estate website.
Why put more work into your website than you should? WordPress has many features and add-ons available, customizing your webpage is a cinch.
Reason #1: Your own domain name.
WordPress is flexible and allows you to self-host your website. You can choose any provider to buy your domain name like GoDaddy.com or BlueHost.com. This means you can have www.YourName.com.
Having your own URL with your name in it makes it a lot easier for renters to find you. This makes you more searchable, establish yourself as a professional rental business and it’s easy for your clients to remember (it’ll be a lot easier to remember than www.free-hosting.com/yourbusinessname/).
Reason #2: Plugins for endless possibilities.
There are over 17,000 plugins available on WordPress, and people are always developing more. If you want to include your rental business’s Twitter feed on your homepage or see detailed statistics or include a Facebook “like”, Google +1 or a Twitter retweet button, there are plugins available for those. You can also include videos of your properties or post a calendar of your showings. Plugins allow your rental website have flexibility for customization.
Reason #3: Wide selection of themes.
Themes, created by designers, guide the look and feel of your website. Themes remove the need for a web designer, because they’re like a packet of pre-made designs. They’re like a coloring stencil; it gives you the outline that is the framework, but you decide what colors and patterns to fill it. In WordPress, you can use themes to shape your website, but you have control over the colors, content and features. There are free themes, paid themes or, if you want, have a developer create a theme for you.
