In order to have a very orderly, logical, geometrically simple-to-follow home page, you do not have to have been around on the web forever.

Look at the relatively new site of the realty team of Rogan and Brow, serving Fallbrook, Temecula Valley, and North San Diego County.

The team has created a webpage that is stunningly easy to read and follow.

Here's why. Consumers will stay on their site after merely a squint because their home page undeniably looks easy to use -- it appears to be a "no brainer," less taxing, simple, clean, appealing, etc. In other works, it works.

And it must work that way, because the number one thing that you want your site to do is bring you consumer inquiries, right? Especially ones that you can convert to sales. (Hint? Put way more than just one single place on your home page where visitors can be inspired to email you. You just never know when someone will be motivated to email you and if they have to hunt for your single email link, you're done for.)

Look at Rogan and Brow's home page again. It's nothing fancy, but readers may get a feeling from the friendly faces in the picture of the agents' willingness to show plenty of area photos, that they are eager to empathize with their customers.

And when someone shows up on your site, empathy is exactly what he or she is looking for, yet seldom gets from agents. That's because most agents are too busy extolling their awards and NAR designations (me, me, me) to care much about the visitor's wants and needs. Those agents and firms are wrong to be "me-oriented"! People care about themselves. So slant your site to their needs! Be "you-oriented."

Think about this: On the Internet, you are your web site! So empathize or lose out.

Visit Rogan and Brow's "Meet our Team" page. There is nothing graphically astonishing about that page. It is just artfully simple. Text items are logically placed alongside the photos so you have no doubt if the text is referring to the picture above or below it, which is often a problem with the "Our Team" pages of many agents' sites.

See, too, how Rogan and Brow used text of two different colors to further set apart different sections from the other. Is the text in your site all the same color? Did you even think about using different colored texts to separate items before this?

Massive content does not have to mean chaos.

If you want to see some really incredible pigeonholing involving the orderly placement of huge amounts of links and content that all somehow still ends up looking easy to follow, see what Fran Vernon, of the team Fran and Rowena has done to their site.

Fran is no computer expert and has taken no classes in web page design, yet her site is a model of organization. It was not easy to end up with that clean and simple, yet content- rich design. In fact, Fran took months to do it from the time she first committed to having a site that looked easy to use. However, every day, she changed something. I know because, online, I watched her do it. You can, too -- just by devoting ten minutes a day.

If Fran, herself, is anything besides being a top producer for her firm, she is terrifically logical and organized. As you can see, her site manifests that. Her shading, varied font size and color, miniature graphics, background shading, headlines, subheads and brilliant use of bullets is partly why her site was winner for "Most Original Content" in the 2004 "Most Impressive Advanced Access Website' Contest."

It not only has lots of content; it looks like it does, too. See how Fran masterfully integrates hypertext links right into her text in a way that makes the links leap out at you as your eyes scan the page.

Well, ideally, you've learned a bit here and now it's time for you to look at your website and see what you can do to make it look easy. Remember, lots of content is no good unless it is organized so that it can be understood.

In addition, to make corrections in the content that you have added to your site, you need to develop, right now, a very jaundiced, discerning, critical eye. The following actions will help:

• First, get rid of all that gray-looking text that you have that runs all the way from the left margin to the right, with no subheads or shading. See how impossibly boring and forbidding it looks? Who wants to work at reading that?

• Second, reformat each page into pigeonholed blocks or boxes using shading, varying column widths, line, shape, form, subheads, boxes, color, font variations, small graphics, photo. Use your imagination. Instead of placing all the content that you have on the home page, create subheads or links for it, and make it a link TO content on an interior page. Often, doing so greatly helps your Google page rank.

• Never mind that you have a designer who works on your site. You tell them where to put the stuff on your page if you think your page doesn't look easy to use. A good way to find out -- ask your friends what you could do to make your site look more easy to use. Better yet? Ask some friend's teenager. Ever notice how they see the things that we don't?

Are you ready to improve your site's look and feel? Don't delay. First, though, save the current version of your pages on your computer so that later, you can go back and compare the old, awkward version with what you'll create anew. You won't believe the difference that just a few days of work on this can make.

Published: July 28, 2005

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Bill Koelzer is a Web marketing consultant to web-proficient agents nationwide. He is co-author, with Barbara Cox, Ph.D., of the Prentice-Hall books, Internet Marketing in Real Estate and Internet Marketing. Bill is also webmaster of Orange County Real Estate, among the most-awarded known Realtor® sites. Visit his website, Koelzer.com or e-mail him at .