How To Make A Website To Sell Your House

Getting your property listed on a website and utilizing social media accounts isn’t enough nowadays to get it sold quickly. To make sure your home attracts the right potential buyers, you should go the extra mile and create a website for it.

Thankfully, making a simple website to sell your home has become too easy in the past few years. Here are the steps you’ll need to take.

Familiarize Yourself With How A Website Works

To make your website on the internet to allow companies that buy houses to see your property, you’ll need to subscribe to a few services. And one of the most important ones is web hosting. However, before you go deep with that, familiarize yourself with how websites work.

Most online pages and their pages are just document files available on the web, with your browser as its main application to open them. And you can code them on your computer or phone with just a text-editing program. 

If you already have those files for your website, you need to get them uploaded to a web hosting provider. It’s online storage where your web documents will be stored and will allow search engines and your visitors to access your site. This is important for your web development.

There are free and paid web hosting providers on the web, and you should decide which one of them you’ll pick.

Before you go to the next section, know that you have the option to get a domain name. A domain name is a technical term for a website’s address. Like with web hosting, there are also free and paid domain names. Nonetheless, if you want to have a domain name of your own, it’s discouraged to get the free ones since they come with many problems.

Decide If You’re Willing To Spend Money On Your Site

If you’re on a tight budget—which may be why you’re going through the For Sale By Owner (FSBO) route—you always have the option to make a website without spending any penny. But do know that there will be some caveats you should know beforehand, as making a website for free comes with strings attached. Some of them are the following:

• Random ads the website provider may put on your site;
• Limited website performance, meaning your site may take a while before it completely loads, especially if it has images; and 
• Restriction on domain name or website address—your website will typically be addressed or located under a subdomain. 

On the other hand, paid services can give you greater control over your website and better performance. Depending on the service package, your mileage may vary. For example, shared hosting may be paid, but it isn’t precisely top-tier regarding performance. If you only plan to let people see images of your house, it should be enough.

Choose Between Coding, Blogging Platform, And Web Building Application

Unlike before, you have the option to code your website or use web-building applications to create a website without coding. 

Web-building applications are simple drag-and-drop programs wherein you can make a site in a few minutes, given that you’re a bit tech-savvy. Luckily, this kind of program comes for free in most hosting packages.

An alternative to coding and using web-building applications are blogging platforms. You won’t need to worry about design and code with a blogging platform. All you need to do is to write content, and the platform will display it on your site, complete with all the bells and whistles you’d expect from a decent blog site. Not to mention that most of them are also free to use, and with some simple customization from you, they can look great.

Learn How To Build Your Website

At this point, all you need to do is to put some work on your website. Depending on the method and platform you choose, expect to spend a week or a month building your website. To make the process faster, do some research a bit.

For instance, if you’re going to use a website builder, you should know the basics of a web page. Here are some terms and concepts you need to become familiar with:

• Document: A web page is often referred to as a document. It’s not essential to delve into why it is, but it’s best practice to refer to it using that term as early as now. 
• Elements: Everything displayed on a website or browser is an element. Some of the elements you should become familiar with are links, paragraphs, images, text areas, input boxes, buttons, and headers.
• Nesting: In creating a website, there’s a term called nesting. This term describes how other elements can be put and exist inside another element. For example, you can put or ‘nest’ a link inside a paragraph element. It may not make sense now, but it will help you get up to speed with how websites work later once you get started.

On the other hand, if you plan to code, you should familiarize yourself with the following terms/concept:

• Hypertext markup language (HTML): This is a markup language, which is the foundation of most websites globally. What it does is it tells websites/browsers what to display on your screen. Case in point, if you want to display a text box where your visitors can leave their email, you’ll need to write HTML code like this: <input id=’email’ type=’text’ /><label for=’email’ >Email Address: </label>.
• Cascading style sheets (CSS): With HTML, developers and website owners use CSS to design a website. While HTML lets you tell browsers what to display, CSS tells your browsers how to display them. Using the previous example, here’s how you can use CSS to alter the appearance of that text box: #email {background-color: white; color: blue; font-size: 2rem;}. 
• JavaScript: You may not need to deal with JavaScript in your case. But to let you become familiar with web development, know that JavaScript provides advanced functionalities in your website that HTML and CSS alone can’t do. It can allow your website to perform animations, compute numbers, process text, and the like.

Sourcing Images And Videos

Even if you’re confident with your words, you can’t sell your home through text alone. The most crucial factor of your website will be pictures and videos of your home. Without them, your website would be a waste of time and money.

Anyhow, when getting web images and videos for your property, take note of the following:

• The pictures and videos should be captured in high-resolution. Properties represented with low-quality pictures are instantly ignored in the market and on the web.
• Make sure that you clean and declutter the property before you take photos or videos. Nobody wants to buy a home full of random knickknacks, unclean pieces of furniture, and vandalized walls.
• Remember that lighting is vital for good photographs and recordings. Have a photoshoot when the sun’s out (or a bit overcast if you live in a place where the sun’s blindingly bright). When taking nighttime photos, or if the photos you took are too dark and dull, be sure to replace failing bulbs and add new lamps and light fixtures.
• Use a tripod or make an effort to shoot straight. A crooked photo of your property doesn’t bode well on the market or the internet. 
• Remember to turn off your camera’s filter. There’s a high chance that you’ll rely on your phone’s camera to take pictures of your home. By default, most phone camera apps nowadays have filters enabled. While those filters can ‘beautify’ the photo, it can appear poorly edited when viewed closely with scrutiny. If your pictures turn out bad when those filters are disabled, it’s either you have bad lighting, shaky hands, or your phone’s camera’s not the right tool for the job.

Conclusions

Reading this document isn’t enough. Once you’re done, it’s recommended that you try to make a website on a free blogging or hosting platform. There, you can practice what you’ve learned and get experimenting. And when you’re done and confident, it’s time to make the website for the house you’re selling.