Washingtonpost.com Uses Content Orbiting In New Real Estate Section

Posted on January 25, 2002

Washingtonpost.com's new real estate section features what washingtonpost.com's CEO and publisher Christopher M. Schroeder refers to as 'content orbiting'. The section puts the user at the center of a 360-degree Internet experience. The real estate section includes content from The Washington Post and surrounds users with real estate tools, features and news.

"'Content orbiting' is a powerful way to deliver the most useful and interesting experience for our users," said Schroeder. "The goal is to eliminate dead-ends and make certain that wherever users go on our site they can easily and quickly move from one task to the next. Whether users are real estate buyers, sellers, renters or owners, they will find a logical path through news and tools that will help them learn and make decisions."

The new section surrounds users with a wide range of content and interactive resources, including washingtonpost.com's exclusive Home Values and Recent Sales features, which allow consumers to research the values and selling prices of area properties. In addition, the site features real estate listings from a variety of sources, stories from Post writers, columns and reports, live discussions, and message boards. Accompanying this package is information from featured advertisers, which provides a virtual marketplace that includes homes for sale, loan rates and offers, rental properties, commercial listings and more.

Schroeder continued, "It's a significant challenge to bring our deep content and resources to the user in a clear, navigable way. Our approach puts the all-important search feature at the center of the experience, and then continually surrounds the user with related information and tools. The resources we make available are both obvious, such as providing home buyers with recent mortgage rates, and more subtle, such as giving renters a mortgage calculator to see if they'd be better off buying. The result is a fulfilling, logical user experience that gives users 360 degrees of access to the real estate world."