There are so many web designers out there preying on real estate agents right now that your chances of wasting money and falling in with an unethical one are probably higher than your chances of doing it right the first time.

Website designers and SEO companies have quickly found out that realtors are their best and most needy customers.   On the whole, realtors have more money to spend, understand the importance of a website, and sadly, they are the most easily taken advantage of.

We at Myrtle Beach Web Design started out doing websites from scratch, and had the good fortune to get into the real estate field in the beginning.   We've seen so many realtors nationwide get a good website going, and with a little SEO help, use it to become the top of their area and make millions of dollars in sales.   I was always ready to share my knowledge and help the ones that asked for advice...and have given out more free knowledge than I ever got paid to perform SEO.   Consequently, we have friends in every state, and a partnership of websites and agents that help us to do what we do.

There are several companies that provide "templated" websites for Realtors.   Although I would advise to avoid most of them like the plague, there are a few that are ok, and even useful.  One of the oldest, and the only one I would ever really recommend is Advanced Access. They can be found at the same dot com name, and for the beginner, someone who can't invest several thousand dollars or more up front, and want to maintain their own website, they are probably the best.  Certainly they are the biggest of the companies...and with their advertising power, have commanded at least a small amount of cooperation from the search engines.   They work hard with the limitations of having a built in editor, to keep the sites as search engine friendly as possible, and to allow for some degree of control over the look of the templates...although when you've seen one, you can usually spot them as soon as you see another.

All in all, they provide a pretty good service for the price...which, I think is under $1000. In contrast, a unique website done by a graphics designer can run several thousand dollars just for the site, and few have any knowledge of how to do even the basics of making a website good for search engine spiders.  Many times, when you later hire a search engine optimization firm to come back in and optimize it, they have to correct or redo the entire site design.   Then you really run into money.   Most of us will not work with a templated site...even an Advanced Access one, because the editors are slow and clumsy compared to our professional website editors...or in my case, my hand-made sites.   I won't name any more names, but if you run across any that have an odd name like "step-to" or "arrow-towards", (synonyms...:-) I would advise you not to even consider them - no how, no way.

Never, ever use a FREE website service that some of the hosting companies offer.  They are branded on every page with links back to the hosting website, and will usually end up banned in Google and Yahoo.  Once that happens, your domain name is useless until someone re-does the website and spends months begging to be re-indexed.

But we've seen dozens of agents get involved with the wrong companies, waste hundreds if not thousands of dollars, and end up having to start over from scratch after being taken advantage of by unscrupulous web designers.  Research the person or company that you hire very carefully.   Stay away from ALL offers of designers in other countries... There is always a reason WHY one designer charges $200 and the majority charge $1500 and up!

Here are some basic do's and don'ts that you should memorize and keep in mind always.