There is a lot to be said about how to design a website and what works best for which industries. You can get design advice from eye tracking experts, your Mom and your co-workers but the simple fact is testing and trial and error are the best ways to hammer out a new design.

Since starting my first real estate site a couple years back I tend to change my site design every six months or so trying to improve visitor conversion rates and usability. Over those years I’ve learned a few good lessons on what to do the next time you decide to change your site design:

Customize your design on a dummy/development site first. – When I was a total newbie I would make changes to my live site on the fly regardless of whether it was being used at the time or not. I wanted it done and that seemed like the only way to get the job done. Now I use a dummy site or, in other words, a website whose sole purpose is to host designs in progress until they’re ready to go live on your real site.

Building a dummy site is easy enough; buy a new domain and add it to your hosting account. Install WordPress automagically and then import your real site’s XML export file into the dummy site. Hack away and then upload the finished design to the live site and change over.

Structure your page hierarchy right the first time. – This is mostly for SEO purposes because waiting for all the search engines to 301 redirect to your new page hierarchy can be a complete pain and affect your search engine rankings for a while.

Take some time to mind map your site’s page hierarchy (i.e. yoursite.com/countyname/town/) and get it right the first time so you don’t get stuck in 301 redirect hell. A side benefit is you won’t have to go patrolling for broken links within your site’s older pages.

Make sure your design has all the page templates you need. – Making sure your theme has all the page templates you need is crucial. If your theme doesn’t have a certain template, like a full width template with no sidebars, you’ll have to shell out and wait for a coder to create a template for your site. Full width page templates are useful for your IDX feeds which tend to take up most of the page width when displayed.

Keep the homepage clutter free. – This is huge. Cluttering up your homepage with added graphics, widgets and statistics that aren’t relevant to your overall goal (getting a buyer to register or contact you and make a sale) shouldn’t be on your homepage. Visitors are easily distracted and you don’t want them playing with your traffic stats widget or, far worse, not being able to find your real estate search among all the visual mayhem.

Leave lifestreaming on blog pages only. – Lifestreaming, also known as broadcasting social media (Twitter, Facebook etc.), is okay for your blog since that is a more “personal” outlet. Having your Twitter feed and Facebook info on your entire website (especially the homepage) will not only increase load times for your website visitor but will also create visual distractions preventing them from doing what you want them to do: ask you for help buying a home.

Make your real estate search front and center. – Keller Williams top producer and all around super agent Sue Adler was kind enough to point out to me that my previous site design wasn’t exactly straightforward with how to search homes for sale. I made the button background red so it would stand out more but with so many other features on the site vying for user attention it got lost in the chaos.

Check out the real estate search difference between my old design and new design below.

Old Design

Old HouseMeetsOwner.com Design

New Design

New HouseMeetsOwner.com Design

Which design do you think has the more noticeable real estate search?

Deactivate unnecessary plug-ins. – For users of CMS platforms like WordPress you can sometimes accumulate a surprising number of plug-ins that, after a while, can really drag out your site’s load times. In other instances (like my own) a plug-in can end up causing a conflict that hurts your site without you knowing it.

For me I had a page redirect plug-in that created a 301 redirect loop between two page links (I changed my page hierarchy and changed it back) forcing the page to not load in any browsers.

I eventually (3 hours later) figured out it was a plug-in causing all the trouble and needless to say I deleted it. Keep your CMS install lean and mean by only using essential plug-ins.

Do you have any website building tips to share or had experience dealing with one of these issues? I’d love to hear what you think in the comments below or on Twitter!