Real Estate Mobility – Mobile Offices for Real Estate

Though many new WordPress bloggers approach theme selection, and even further customization of their theme, from the esthetic and flashy presentation aspects, there are far more important things to think about.  And, these things can make the difference in getting new visitors, keeping them, and ultimately doing business from your blog.

It is important for your visitor to have a pleasant experience, and to have a good impression of your blog’s appearance.  However, it’s much more important for them to be able to locate the information they want easily.  The theme you choose can do both, but there are several important considerations.

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• Screen size and scrolling – Check themes to see if they are a fixed width or if they are variable, changing width to accomodate the screen size.  Though variable seems to be better, sometimes it’s a problem with different browsers.  I like a fixed width of 900 or fewer pixels, as this is good for most notebooks as well as desktops.  Also make sure that it centers on the screen.  Visitors HATE to scroll to the right to see all of your information.
• Header size and “above the fold” – Above the fold is that area on any screen that is visible before you must scroll downward.  This is your critical display area, and you want your most important content and navigation there.  When you select a theme with a very large header, this is eating up your usable “above the fold” screen area.  Real estate template themes are very bad about this.  They think that large images of beautiful homes or areas are great.  They aren’t!  This is especially true if you manage to get repeat visitors who finally tire of always having to scroll down to see what they want because of an image they’re very tired of seeing.
• Number of columns – WordPress themes can be found with two, three or even four columns.  This is a very personal choice, but also one of visitor ease of use as well.  I tend toward two or three column themes, as I want the text of posts to be easy to read in a wider format in the main column.  However, the type of information and graphics that you’ll be posting is a major factor here.  Don’t just add columns so that you can have a lot of cool widgets and plugins.  They do slow down your page loads.
• Custom themes – I recommend “magazine” and “newsy” themes for community oriented blogs.  These usually tend toward very custom looks for the main page, without the list of posts you’re used to seeing.  They’ll have lead and feature stories, as well as very nice image display.  Just fit the look to your content, and always be cognizant of wasted space in the header and what they’ll see “above the fold.”

Here’s a link to the WordPress.org page with hundreds of themes that can be searched by type, number of columns and more.

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