Hello everyone. I'm excited about joining this forum and learning from other real estate webmasters and agents across the country who are tech-savvy.

Along those lines, I've just spent a little over $20,000 on a new website that has custom-IDX and some other cool features. As I spent more than 6 months in development, I am totally biased at this point and can't tell what needs improvement or could be added to make the website a better experience for the user.

If you have a free moment and could offer your two cents, I'd really appreciate it! The website is http://www.ocrealestateadvisors.com . Also, if you have a cool website I should check out, please send me a PM with the URL.

Many thanks!

Easy to ready, easy find your way around, clean with a white background and plenty of white space for easier reading.

Question: who is Cinch2Sell?

They are mentioned in your client testimonials, doesn't match the company name, so may be confusing to people as to who the real estate company is.

Question: if Costa Mesa is next door to Newport, how come your company doesn't cover Costa Mesa?

In my opinion, if you are going to name your company after a region or county, then the whole area should be included because it implies that you do cover it. It looks more like you are covering the southern part of OC. If this is true, I believe it should be clarified clearly on your landing page, otherwise links to the other city's in the area should be included.

Other than that I like the layout and colors.

Very nice website.
It is user friendly and easy to navigate through the iavailable information.

Good luck

Where the heck were people like you when I was designing websites? My former clients were shocked when I wanted $800 - $1000 for designing their websites.

$20,000? Holy guacamole...

It looks like a fantastic site.

I will say this, if they charged you big bucks for that custom header, I think you got ripped off. Those houses are nothing more than an enlarged font character (can't remember if it's a Wingdings font or a Webdings font, but I have about 5 different sets of Wingdings and Webdings fonts and that set of houses is one of them...I've used it myself in graphics.)

At that price they should have created a custom graphic from scratch. Just my opinion....

It looks like you have quite a nice site there. I would have to agree with Perky about the header... you should have really gotten something that doesn't look stretched for $20k.

It's also good to see that it works in FireFox and IE. One thing you might want to check is FireFox 3 comes out June 17th, so I would download that when the time comes and browse your site to make sure everything is still working properly.

Looks like a nice site - but 20K seems really high for it to me...

did they write all the content? or did you provide it?

Site looks really great, very professional and clean. Nice integration of listings. I think the only thing wrong with this picture is the $20,000. Next time try Elance. Our last site make over cost us $700 including a short flash intro.

This is a nice site...functionality is great!

i like your site but you paid too much. especially since mike only paid 700 bucks and his looks equally great. one question mike are you able to make changes to your site or do you have to hire the developer to make them for you. also can you add pages if you like? i am interested in this concept since you can get hosting for like 20 bucks a month with go daddy.

There is no comparison between these 2 sites. The $700 site sends you to another site to search for homes while the more expensive site has an on site page for each individual listing.

A site consists of more than the looks of the homepage.

It's true, listings are the most important part of the site and we pay another company for access to the listings. We're working right now to have the listings upgraded with a better look and more search features, but its only $50 a month for that service and all the listings come up with our contact information.

This site is definitly the nicer site, just not sure its worth 25x what we spent. Guess it depends on what the average comission is and how far ahead of other realtors in the area it puts you.

My view is that your website has to be completely revamped every 2 years to keep ahead, or at least keep up with people in your market place and I can't imagine spending that kind of money every couple years... although if this is that advanced I guess you could just change the look and keep the back end.

Luckily we have it easier here in Ontario since realtor sites are not as advanced as they are in much of the US.

To GetSmart: The company that did this for $700 was pretty no frills, they did everything we asked, but there is no upkeep service included. Once the project is done you're on your own unless you want to pay them by the hour for additional work. I know just enough of dreamweaver that I can make smaller changes and add pages myself in necessary.

thats your opinion and i have mine, from a standpoint of someone that is browsing through both sites, i would be stuck trying to decide which one i would go with. i would probably submit my informatin to both sites and let the best person win.

thats all i am saying, you can get technical but from an average joe, i don't see the difference. you do because you know about idx and all that stuff, i don't so i just stated my opinion.

Thank you for all of the feedback! Very helpful.

JBT4RE: My previous dba was Cinch2Sell, which I obviously needed to change to reflect current market conditions. The search engines recently got the update to my site, so it reflects my current dba, O.C. Real Estate Advisors.

JBT4RE: I didn't include Costa Mesa in my coverage area because I am less familiar with that area personally and don't currently have an agent who works in that area. I agree though that the company name implies that I cover the entire county. One of the thoughts I had about dealing with this situation is to expand my site to cover all of the cities and establish referral agreements with agents who work for other companies and want the leads my site will generate. I have done that in the past, but so much of it depends on finding the right agent to send the referrals to!

dresden: Thanks for the tip about Firefox 3. I'll have to check it out and see whether it causes any problems for the site.

ManFromTheBand: I wrote all of the content myself and provided it to the developer.

Very nice site, but 20k is waaayyy too much. Recouping that will take a while. I hope you don't have to pay for maintenance.

Like the site. Way too pricey.

But.... In your area commissions tend to be on the higher side.

So if it helps you make additional sales, then $20,000 was worth it.

Good luck.

Looks cool. I checked a few cities like Brea, Plancenta (weird name for a city), Buena Park, and Dana Point and got no description and no properties for sale. Should you be getting zero listings back for those places?

Amanda is cute. :)

Website seems way over priced for $20k, but I don't really know what the IDX is supposed to do because I couldn't get any listings to show up.

Joe

As the old saying goes anyone can make anything nice if they throw money at it. The real trick is to do it on a shoe string. You overpaid IMO.

I say, why wouldn't it be worth it? It's a clean design, appears to be user-friendly- and most people don't know what the site has on the backend. What if it has a great contact manager that has a means of capturing internet leads and closing them? Not all the money for websites is spent on the front-end.

I like your site, and I'm sorry if my post sounded a little harsh to others, it's not intended to flame anyone :)

I couldn't find any homes for sale. Since the original post was written back in June, and by some of the posts it seems there USED to be homes there...one has to wonder where the listings have gone.

Thus one jumps to conclusions....maybe the site cost TOO MUCH MONEY and put them out of business? What good is a real estate site that has no listings?



Well, I liken it to the idea of buying a 100,000 car vs. a Honda. Sure, the 100,000 has some nice bells and whistles but when all is said and done it's still a car. And if you can't afford to maintain it, then was it "worth it" to buy that over something more affordable, and thus more practical?

SO many real estate agents are not practical.

Someone spent 20,000 on this site that is now worthless, and seems to have been lacking listings for at least two months. Do you still wanna say this site was worth it?

My site costs me a couple hundred bucks a year for hosting and for the IDX listings. It gets me leads. It's working.

It looks good, it's user friendly, and it doesn't have an oversized free font as a header graphic.

[quote=Perky_REALTOR]

Well, I liken it to the idea of buying a 100,000 car vs. a Honda. Sure, the 100,000 has some nice bells and whistles but when all is said and done it's still a car. And if you can't afford to maintain it, then was it "worth it" to buy that over something more affordable, and thus more practical?
[/quote]

Well my website concentrates on earning income. My car doesn't. I will spend the money for that, and have. Especially if I get a 300% return from it in one year.

I agree with you, if you can't afford to maintain it, then it's not worth it (as in this circumstance).

I couldn't make any income without my car. Do you sell real estate on foot?

Some agents consider the "image" very important, thus they'll spend a gazillion more bucks to have an "impressive" car - much like they'll spend too much to have an "impressive" website that does less business than something simple - and practically free - like this one:

http://www.orlandomarketreport.com/ (The owner says he gets a huge amount of leads from this. Of course that's taking his word for it...)

Re: the car....Sorry, couldn't resist being a smart-aleck.

You have a point about the car! :)

Cheers,

I can prove that he over paid. If you go to guru.com and post his site and ask for quotes you would be shocked. The person that made it probably had it made at guru and pocketed the extra 19k laughing all the way to the bank.

Seriously this is one cool site if you have not seen it and want web work done.

How's your SERPs?

and the real question... any leads so far?

and... your call us now button on the bottom left does not work for me.

These guys know what they are doing. Its not only about website design and navigational experience. Its content architecture is well planned and the integration of custom idx and features is pretty good.

They are not only webmasters or tech integrators, they are also good in marketing communications. That's where their value is. Its probably worth 10 to 15 grand but certainly not 20!

According to one website value calculator, the site is worth $420.

Ouch!

www.yourwebsitevalue.com is a little nicer - it says it's worth $736.

Stimator.com is the most generous, offering a little over $1,000. That same estimator gave my site, which I built myself, a value of over 10,000. Interesting....

Value is based on backlinks, inbound links, traffic, search engine placement, etc...and of course should not be taken literally, but it's interesting just the same.

I've done all my own web development for my sites so think $20K is quite a lot for just the site alone. If you were paying $20K for a site that already has good interent presence, ranks well, and has a fair number of leads already coming in from it, then $20K could be a bargain

Well it looks good. Your site Alexa rank is 0. How do you get traffic to it. Web presence is king. 20K would have been good if it ranked on the first page of your key words.

Very nice site and easy to navigate. I think you may have paid a little to much, but I don't know all that you got for your money.

From SEO standpoint it seems that your are trying to promote:
O.C. Real Estate Advisors
Orange County Real Estate

The 1st appears twice only - no real mention of keywords in the body content.
Orange County Real Estate in headings but not text content.

Design: clean professional design

The real answer is... Only you can answer whether or not your $20k was worth it. Any other advice given here is pure speculation, technical, or irrelevant to your question to begin with.

My personal opinion - No not at all worth $20k. Sales people love to be sold and you were sold. Nothing wrong with that as long as you are satisfied with the end result. So...

Since we do not know what goals you and your developer established before the site was created and whether or not those goals have been achieved. Was it SEO for keywords? Was it corporate branding? Was it newsletter signups? Was it strictly ROI based on your different verticals?

I am sure you had goals in mind and and am also sure you are measuring the performance of the site to those goals. If your goals are being met, job well done and well worth it.

Do not get me wrong, specific functionality not working and listings not being found and other site issues are a definite signs of value, which is at the heart of your question, but I have seen some crap sites earn huge money so it is certainly not the deciding factor.

$20K? OUCH!

There is no website worth 20k in my opinion. That 20k hopefully includes extensive SEO work

I like your site, very clean and intuitive to use. I am not a techie, so I cant speculate as to how well it does for SEO and if a big part of your investment was made towards SEO/SERPs. But I can see how you could have a high capture rate from your site as it is very user-friendly.

I guess it wasn't worth the $20,000.00 - or it changed domains - lol

I would give one red cent for it as it is.

Just sayin

If the site has all this, I would say it could be worth 20k:

SEO for your top keywords and you place in the top 3 on Google.

Continued monthly/weekly SEO.

A custom IDX search.

Google maps search tool.

The cost includes setup of the custom IDX.

Form submissions functionality.

Site map.

A pay per click campaign(to help the site get started)

A system that allows visitors to see the homes for sale but requires they register to see most of the details.

There is probably more I would demand for this price, but you get the point.

Sadly i wasn't able to bring it up when trying. I'll try again later...

It looks like Amanda is out of the business - and has been since November 2008- which is not that long after she forked over $20,000 for the website. No one thought the site was effective enough to take it over from her either. So, I guess the answer to "Was my $20,000 worth it?" has proven to be NO.

In the end, whether you generate business from the web bears little relationship to the cost, complexity, or eye-catching design of your website.

With that, I will lock this thread since the poster's question was definitively answered.