Local / Social Website for Community & Real Estate Practice

Marble Falls Real Estate

Marble Falls, Texas, is a small but rapidly growing community in central Texas. About 40 minutes from Austin, we have a lot of new people moving to the area for the lakes, hills, and scenery.

MarbleFallsRealEstate.com is a real estate practice in the area focused on helping residents of other cities find second homes or investment properties. We also have a property management company that is responsible for handling all of the administrative work of managing rental properties, home owners' associations, and apartment complexes on behalf of our clients, who are the owners of those properties.

The target audience for this site is someone who is considering moving to Marble Falls or someone who has recently moved to Marble Falls.

The site design should be modern, but not flashy. It should attract a user who is a novice to moderate user of the Internet and web, but it should not target web experts.

Our vision for this website is twofold. Primarily, we desire it to focus on promoting properties for sale and for rent, outside of the typical real estate sites that simply wrap an MLS listing inside an IFRAME. We want the site to personalize these properties and listings, and we want the website to generate inbound phone calls (leads) for us to work with on selling and renting these properties. We want pages for "homes for sale", "land for sale", "homes for rent", etc.

Secondly, we want the website to serve as a community hub for all sorts of businesses, activities, organizations, and clubs that you might find in a community. An example of this part of the website would be kingwood.com. While it is not a real estate practice, it is a good example of the "community hub" I'm describing. This part of the website will have pages for "plumbers", "doctors", "electricians", "restaurants", and other high level yellow-pages type categories.

The design must include the following:
1. A home page that prominently features one or more homes for sale or for rent in the body of the page
2. A global navigation that includes a search box, plus links to "Real Estate", "Business Directory", "Jobs", "News", and "Classifieds". These links should be text, not images.
3. A search results page
4. A "blog post" that shows one featured home for sale or rent.
5. A logo. The logo we would like for you to use is http://99designs.com/logo-design/co…ntries/593 Use either the white or black background in your design. (We recently concluded this contest and do not have the graphic design files yet.) Unlike other contests you may have designed for, we do not want the logo to be huge; however, we do want it to be readable.
6. We want little to no stock photography.
7. We do not want a website that looks like a stuffy insurance or law website. We want the look & feel to be business casual.
8. The design should be clean, not busy at all. Minimalistic is ok
9. The design should not include any flash elements.

For reference, we love designs such as http://bit.ly/6N1X7o and http://bit.ly/10H61E