The difficulty in creating a customer-centric website lies within the customers using the website. Customers will all look at a website and evaluate it differently, based on things such as ease of use, level of technological aptitude needed to navigate the page, use of graphics and video, use of fonts, and countless other things that are seemingly small, but can have an impact on the customer. Therefore while I might look at a website and consider it to be "customer-centric", my grandfather may look at it and have an entirely different view, based on his personal outlook as a consumer.
Another important point to note is that where websites may have once been used only to convey information or deals to a customer, we are now seeing a growing numbers of entities that have transactional capabilities on their website - that is to say, customers are now able to purchase direct from the website, rather than using it as a tool to decide or do research on a product. This change in how websites are used has led to it being far more important to focus on the customer, rather than the product.
2. Define the term "presence"
Well, its definitely not the presents above (sorry for the bad humour, but this used to be a pet hate of mine, people using presents and meaning presence or vice versa)
Presence (in an online sense) basically means how easy it is to find yourself or your company online, it measures how pervasive you are as an online entity. Nowadays, with the growing fad of people using social networking for marketing, it is a lot easier to make your entities presence grow on the internet. Its just a matter of getting a Twitter, a Facebook, a Picasa, a blog... The more you can push your entity online, the greater your presence will be.
That being said, having too great a presence online can be detrimental to your business. Whilst having multiple accounts on different sites can help you establish presence, if you flood the Net with it, you risk alienating consumers, or them becoming apathetic towards your business. It is a fine balance between creating an effective presence without overdoing it.
3. What can Real Estate agents best accomplish through
a) Their Websites
Having a digital presence online would be of great benefit to real estate agents, as it allows people to preliminarily view a house that they may not have been able to otherwise, thus opening the market up to a previously un-engageable consumer. It really widens the market base, and takes a lot of the burden and time management hassles out of their jobs.
b) Mass Media advertising
Similar to the above point, but also captures that portion of the market who may not use the internet, or if they do, would not use if for the purpose of looking at houses. Also catches "spontaneous" buyers who may not be particularly looking for property, but have the wherewithal to purchase a property on the fly.
c) Personal Contact
The personal contact facet would be the closing of the sale, and establishing of rapport with the potential customer. The website and/or mass media advertising are really what generates interest and contributes largely to the actual sale of the house, so in this way the sale is almost process-driven, and without the first two methods, personal contact would be pretty much negligible.
References
"Digital Design" Lecture by Michael Rappa (transcript)
http://digitalenterprise.org/transcripts/design_tr.html
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