I have been nominated for a shorty award in 2 categories: #socialmedia and #engelvoelkers. I would really appreciated it if you would vote for me in the #engelvoelkers category.

Why should you vote for me? I will tell you!

Besides being the licence partner at Engel & Völkers Sint-Martens-Latem, I am also a full-time student at the College of Ghent (HoGent), and all of the little spare time that I have, goes into my companies.

Due to the fact that Engel & Völkers was not very know in Belgium 3 years ago, I had to do something about that. So I decided to get more brand awareness through contacting the youth first, and what is the youth doing these days? There on social media! So I decided to put the brand on every social media that I could think of.

Since a little over 2 years I have put us on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube (MySpace, Netlog). I also started the Engel & Völkers Sint-Martens-Latem Blog, created a wikipedia-page, and continue to post as much new info on social websites via our blog. This all to keep a constant stream of info about the brand and the network in the hope to raise the brand awareness.

By my feeling, and what the people around me are telling me, my efforts are not going unnoticed and have raised the brand’s presence and awareness a lot in Belgium, Europe and further.

I hope this little text has convinced you to vote for me, and when you vote for me don’t forget to put something after the “because …”. Otherwise the vote does not count.

Sincerely,

To further expand the website of Engel & Völkers Sint-Martens-Latem being http://www.evlatem.be. We realized that there was still one thing missing from the website.

We already covered the following:

• Property search
• Services
• About us
• Contact
• Links
• Mobile site
• …

But as mentioned above we still had not covered one thing, yet.
So what we had not covered yet was a blog. So I started working on a blog layout.

So what will the blog be about, you might ask.

It will be about Engel & Völkers Sint-Martens-Latem, offcourse, as well as the brand’s (Engel & Völkers) regional, national and international expansion/presence. As well as the marketing that  Engel & Völkers Sint-Martens-Latem has done in the area. And the blog will also be giving pointers/tips to sellers or buyers about what to look for or improve when buying or selling a property.

If you want to check out Engel & Völkers Sint-Martens-Latem new blog click underneath:

Engel & Völkers Sint-Martens-Latem Blog

Engel & Völkers Sint-Martens-Latem realized that if they wanted to reach as many people as possible via their website. As well as give all visitors a great user-friendly experience, that they needed to jump on the mobile boat.

So we sat together and thought of what definitely had to be incorporated and what could be left out. We came to the conclusion that this were the 4 main pages that had to be incorporated:

1. Properties (search),
2. Services,
3. About,
4. Contact form

So I started with these criteria in mind. No more, no less.

To check out the final product, being a small but informative website click underneath or on pic:

http://www.evlatem.be/iphone

The mobile website has been active for about a week now, and I think that we are able to say that it has been a success. At the moment the mobile site is used by almost 10% of all our visitors. (Not taking in account the launch views.)

After having launched the previous design. Which was good and user-friendly, but there were still many differences to the subdomain website (www.engelvoelkers.com/latem).

So after having had and used the previous design for a little more then 1 month. We decided to change it again, but this time to a design similar to the subdomain. This new design has more capabilities as our subdomain but both are very user-friendly and similar in many ways.

I can definitly say that the design has been received very well. In the  couple of weeks that the new design has been up and running, we have had more return surfers as well as more unique surfers.

We will keep improving the website to accommodate as many people as possible.

If you have not seen the new design yet, go and check it out by clicking the following link :www.evlatem.be

Again after a lot of brainstorming on how to improve the site. We finally were able to draw up a design that worked for Engel & Völkers Sint-Martens-Latem second site.

The keys the new design were to keep it simple but it had to be almost identical to the subdomain page (www.engelvoelkers.com/latem).

To make sure of this we wanted to incorporate some of the subdomain pages. Which we were able to do very easily.

But the main reason for the second site was because there were a couple of functions that were not able to be incorporated  into the current subdomain. Such as to ability to click on properties and receive the properties of the shop immediately. Without having to search first. (this has been fixed on the second site).

Also there was no specific page yet for viewing the opening hours and a map of the shop’s location.

www.evlatem.be