In this showcase, we are going to explore some of the best real estate website designs to inspire you. Real estate is valuable, and it is usually an expensive purchase. Home buyers often do copious research online before acquiring a new home or property. In our present age, gathering information is typically done on the internet so a powerful and captivating website design could make or break a sale.
The same goals are shared by all real estate agents. They all like to build a lucrative real estate business and become the “go to” guys in their locality. To be able to achieve these goals, they should be able to fulfill the four basic needs of the consumers. All consumers like to be able to search the hottest real estate listings and access the statistics of the local market in order to know how it is doing. In addition, they also like to know the worth of their homes and/or learn more about the locality. This would include finding the best neighborhoods and schools.
The best real estate website design should be able to fulfill all of the basic needs of consumers, in addition to being user friendly. It should be designed in a way that makes the content accessible easily to sellers, buyers and those that are only interested in knowing the community.
In the more than 35 top real estate website designs I have featured in this post, I hope that you will get a better idea on why top Realtor websites are up there. Enjoy browsing and should you need more information, just click on the “More Info” link I have provided with each website. Also, please join the conversation! Do you think I have included most of the best real estate website designs in my compilation? If you have any thoughts or suggestions on beautiful real estate websites, talk to us by sharing your comments below. I also encourage you to go to Splashmagazine and browse their collection on real estate website templates.
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With WordPress Pinterest plugins you can integrate your website with one of the fastest growing social networking services right now. Pinterest allow users to create pin boards where they can pin images they find online. The ease of use and fully visual interface have made Pinterest a favorite among creative people and marketers quickly learned that pinning high quality product images works well. In fact, Pinterest is one of the most trafficked websites online and consumers like it for finding shopping inspiration and creating wishlists.
For most online business owners, bloggers and marketers there is a huge benefit related to getting content, product images, logos etc. into as many social feeds as possible. Getting shared, commented on, liked, re-pinned, and even have your Pins tweetet increase the reach and awareness and it is free. Question is however, how do you get other people to share your content and make it go viral among the more than 48.7 million hungry buying users on Pinterest?
One of the most classic ways to make visitors on a website share content on their social accounts, such as Pinterest, is simply to add a social share button. For Pinterest this is called a Pin-button. When a visitor clicks on a Pin-button they are easily allowed to pin one of the images of the current page to one of their boards.
With WordPress it is easy to integrate Pinterest and tap into the potential by adding plugins that will enable Pinterest content sharing convenient for the user. These plugins enable “pin worthy” images to be added easily on their boards so that users can freely share it and engage their friends to do the same.
In this article, I have collected 10 of the best Pinterest Plugins you can install in your WordPress site to help visitors share your content and add it to their boards.
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By using WordPress portfolio themes, you can get a top notch online portfolio set up fast to show of your skills, products and clients. WordPress portfolios comes in many different designs and layouts and can serve as a valuable communication and marketing tool for various industries. Often however, we see online portfolios used for showcasing creative work by designers, photographers and so on.
The fact that it is super easy and cheap to get started with WordPress makes it an ideal publishing platform for small business owners and individuals. As you can see below there are also a great supply of portfolio style themes and plugins you can use for building a professional portfolio website according to your needs and design preferences.
In this article, I have put together a large collection of excellent portfolio themes for WordPress and I am sure it will be a great help to get you started. Another relevant type of themes for building an online portfolio is photography themes for WordPress and you should check our the collection they published on CreativeCan. Many of the themes have responsive layouts, and I generally recommend you opt in for one of these. You see, responsive themes use CSS media queries to adjust the layouts to match screen sizes on smartphones and tablets.
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by Lars on April 25, 2013
WordPress menu plugins helps you get more control of the navigation on your WordPress website both when it comes to look and feel, functionality and administration. One of the recent web design trends is to use responsive layouts to make websites mobile friendly and this also introduces new requirements to website navigation design. In addition, we have seen more and more website that use mega menus to ease navigation and promote important content more effectively.
Navigation is one of the most important parts of web design and it is not as easy to get right as most people think. Making sure visitors navigate effectively and find what they are looking is a top priority and design and functionality must be perfectly aligned with the content.
There are many cool WordPress navigation plugins you can use to set up the navigation style and menus you want. I have collected more than 35 plugins and categorized them into the following categories: Responsive menus, not responsive menus, menu widgets and admin menu plugins. I hope you find the WordPress menu plugin you are looking for.
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by Lars on April 24, 2013
A growing tendency recent years has been to keep it simple. This trend has generated a number of interesting design elements such as flat style metro icons that is an important and prominent feature of the trendy minimalistic and simple interface web design.
Unlike prior popular icon design involving shadow effects, edges and heavy use of 3D effects the simple design of the flat style metro icons can interact with most kinds of web designs. Minimalistic and simple websites and metro style designs are great examples of this. WordPress themes with Metro style design are great if you like metro and they also look great with some of the flat style metro icons you can find in this post. In addition you can find a lot of ready to use metro scripts for adding metro style and functionality to your web pages.
For this article I have found quite a few flat style metro icon sets you can browse through and perhaps find a set that fits your needs. Please leave me a comment on which icon set you like the most. Enjoy!
by Lars on April 22, 2013
Color is one of the most decisive elements in any kind of design and the color palette used have a huge effect on the mood of the viewers. Experienced designers know exactly what colors to use for waking up certain emotions and feelings in people.
One of the initial steps when designing websites and creating graphic designs is to choose the right color palette. This will work as the foundation for coloring any design element during the work, which is why, creating a cool color up front palette may be a bit challenging. One of the popular ways to get started is to look for color inspiration e.g. in stripe patterns and colorful websites or simply use a color tool.
Finding the right tool to help you choose the right color palette is however not that easy. While the color schemes might be basic the tools on the other hand offers many different services. Some gives you the opportunity to create and share your own unique colors, palettes and patterns while others let you preview your color combinations in real time.
Luckily, there are many different tools for choosing the right color palette. I have found quite a few of these tools to help you save time so you can focus on choosing the right color palette. Enjoy the color hunt! [click to continue…]
by Lars on April 18, 2013
Even for skilled users of Photoshop consulting a tutorial can be needed from time to time. Especially if you are grappling with new techniques such as using Photoshop watercolor brushes.
Water coloring is an old technique that is said to date back to the cave paintings of Paleolithic Europe! Throughout the centuries, both professional artists and amateurs have used this technique to create artwork. Unlike oil and acrylic painting, the strokes created from watercolors look quite different as the stroke you paint do not remain sitting but flows out and change shape as the paint hardens. This makes the brush strokes unique and especially hard to mimic on a computer as they are organic.
However, by using Photoshop watercolor brush sets you can get that special look and feel into your design quite easily. It might take some time to find out how to make it look natural but with the right tutorials at hand, it is durable.
I have search the Internet to find the best Photoshop watercolor tutorials and brush set for you to get started. Please let me know if I missed out a brush set or a great tutorial. Hope you will have lots of fun learning this technique. Enjoy!
by Lars on April 16, 2013
QR code have become very popular for looking up URLs with Apps using smartphone cameras as scanners. QR is an abbreviation of Quick Response and the QR code system is actually just a two-dimensional bar code system. It is a machine-readable label that can be used to store a small amount of information. The QR code was initially designed in Japan for the automotive industry it is commonly used today for many different purposes such as product tracking, letter identification, time tracking and of course for all kinds of marketing. This is why we start to see QR codes on posters, in TV, business cards etc.
With the popularity of QR codes there is a creative trends coming up where designers create working QR-codes that are decorative and even artworks of their own. If you have not seen this kind of art before and think, it is interesting; then you have come to the right place. I have collected more than 50 different and amazingly creative QR code artworks [click to continue…]
by Lars on April 15, 2013
One of the emerging trends in web design is using large photo backgrounds. Depending on the type of business, you are designing the website for the needs will differ however; it seems like large photo backgrounds is catching on widely these days. In addition, it is a trend to use full screen video backgrounds on creative websites such as portfolios and fashion shops.
The use of large photo backgrounds are many as you can see in the examples below, and with the right WordPress photography theme it is actually rather easy mimicking as well. The availability if great designs is amazing – just check this article for inspiration and see for yourself!
The advantages of using large photo backgrounds are many as the design gives you a different appearance compared to other websites. The usage of large images creates a calm yet catchy appear that works wonders when it comes to attracting the visitors attention immediately. On the other hand, it is important to consider load performance as large images with many details take time to download.
For this post, I have found some really great looking examples of large photo background website designs that I hope you will find inspirational and use for designing your own large photo background website. Enjoy!
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by Lars on April 12, 2013
Brick wall brushes are great design resources for anyone working on a website background or a design with a grunge touch. Just like wall textures you can use a brick wall brush for adding a wall or just a wall like surface to design elements. I am quite sure they will be great in combination with some cool bullet hole brushes and grunge patterns for Photoshop.
The Photoshop brush tool (B) is really popular and it is highly powerful is you know how to use it and have a good meaty collection of Photoshop brushes. For this article, I have collected over 45 useful brick wall brush sets you should consider to add to your design toolbox. [click to continue…]