Hi all, just finished a new site.

Lay it on me....

http://www.homeintheberkshires.com

If you want the search engines to take notice you better add some content.

Take your name and the company name out of the meta title and replace with keywords.

Thanks Big Toe ...anyone else?

It took a long time to load and I have a fast connection. People with 56K or dial up will click off before you come up.
Connection Rate Download Time
14.4K 212.29 seconds
28.8K 109.24 seconds
33.6K 94.52 seconds
56K 59.19 seconds
ISDN 128K 22.43 seconds
T1 1.44Mbps 7.61 seconds

I think the picture is way to big, and doesn't look real. You need to get your content and call to action above the fold (so it shows up without having to scroll down). On every page I looked at it was the same thing...Huge fake house, not much info.

Edit:Wow I just ran my own home page and it's slow too! haven't checked in awhile! the tool is here http://www.websiteoptimization.com/

I would take the speed stats from weboptimizer.com with a grain of salt - considering that they promote services to speed up websites.

The site loads instantly for me. When I do a speed test at http://www.iwebtool.com/speed_test their results say 1.29 seconds which would be more in line with the actual load time I experience .

I think - may be mistaken - that Firefox has an add on that you can get to tell you how long a page takes to load.

With any site, the objective should be to generate business.

Has your site been responsible for a closed transaction? If not, then as they say it is a "Billboard on the Moon" ie it is there, it may be glorious, but if no one sees it, then it is simply an electronic business card.

This site has some big challenges.
Look at mine:
http://www.LAexclusiveProperty.com

Tom

Tom, your website is tremendous. I love how you set it up, with the menu options running down the left side of the home page and you do have some good content on the home page as well, which is the main thing that the home in the Bershires website is lacking. Has your website been pretty successful since you created it? I would be shocked if it wasn't.

I agree with Tom,

it is all about generating leads. Here my experience. I had my website up for 6 months with nobody contacting me. OK was not high up on the search engines, but even the few people that found me never contacted me.

I had a look at your MLS search. That is what 80% of visitors will be after. On my website one will be presented with the search results and if one wants to look at the property details one has to log in.

You do not require log in. Since I have been requiring a log-in I do get sign ups.

I agree with Toby that a great number of visitors will be looking for an MLS search but everyone will have that on their web site. You need to stand out, be different, be a destination with other information that people are looking for - information about your area. Not a list of links. Anyone can provide that but rather stories, articles and interesting tid-bits about your city/town/area that they won't find on all of your competition's web sites.

If search engine ranking is a concern, keep in mind that it's been found that the spiders tend to like pages with approximately 1,000 words - and make that content rich with keywords. (Ensure it reads well by humans first, utilizing your keywords and phrases throughout your text.) "They" (being the experts I follow), say that keyword saturation should be about 2% - 7% of your content.

deapsea also had a great point that your call to action (what exactly do you want your visitors to do?) should be "above the fold". This has been proven time and again to be the most effective.

It's important in the beginning stages of a web site to first determine your goals for your Internet presence and then build your site around those goals, rather than trying to squeeze it in after a "pretty" site has been achieved.

Just my two cents. ;-)
Cheers,
Pam

Use some flash into the header. Will look great with scrolling effects! nice job!

I don't like flash banner, pages or whatever flash, for not all viewers (internet users) has a flash plugin to view your pages and in other cases if the one browsing your site is on work they block some script making your site look not the way you want it to look.