If you’re hiring someone else to build your home staging website, be prepared for it to take up to 6 months. Cost will be in the $5,000 range if they really know what they’re doing. You have to provide all the copy, photographs, think through the logic of what pages you want, and how your linking between pages will work.

You can find people out there to build a site for $1,000 or less, but you usually get what you pay for. The site may or may not look nice, and the designer may not have the proper expertise to ensure your site is built so search engines can find it. This would be like organizing a party and hiring a caterer but then forgetting to send out any invitations. If there are no guests (ie: website visitors) what’s the point?

A number of people have recently joined the Staging Diva Directory of Home Stagers with Mini Listings because they already have their own sites. I always visit their sites, and being somewhat compulsive, I also peak behind the scenes at the code to see if their website designer has built the site to do well with search engines.

Search engines don’t read a website the way you and I do.

Search engines look at the code behind the scenes – not what appears on the page to a person visiting. You should peak at this code yourself by going to “View Source” in your browser when you are at each page of your site.

I’ll share more tips about developing your home staging website in future posts or you can refer to the April issue of Staging Diva Dispatch for more details. If you don’t currently subscribe to this monthly home staging newsletter, you can do so now by filling in the boxes at the top left of this page with your contact details.