Just thought I ask everybody's opinion about our new site:

www.thegoheens.com

I understand that not everyone loves flash. The "cities" page is being worked on and should be completed by the end of this week.

For you search engine optimization people, I am still working on that too.

Thanks in advance for any advice!

-Ben

Personally... I find the sound (effects) annoying!

I have my speakers off so I don't know about the sound effects but the site design and flash is pretty impressive.

Sorry, no constructive criticism here.

Not trying to be a smart a$$ ... and the site is very attractive ....

But I can't figure out where you work.

I don't like fancy flash on a website. It does work on my mac, which is good. You may want to gather a test audience because flash animation does not appeal to everyone. Most technie people hate it because it's unnecessary. You can always have several sites.

Have you already tested with people on slower modems? My site loads slowly on them, so we're optimizing.

I had an idea. What if you have a flash and non-flash version of the site? This is often pretty easy to do and templates come in both.

Also, you need a link for turning sound off.

Canadave - on the contacts page, our office address is listed there.

Dee - I update/change my site pretty frequently. Flash is hard enough, I don't want to edit several pages every time I make a small change. As for the sound, it is only at the begining. The only way to have it turned off is to eliminate it all together. And like I mentioned before, I know not everybody likes flash on web sites, but then again not everybody loves ice cream as much as I do.

Thanks Ben .... you have a very attractive site.

...... my point was that as someone who visited your site without actually looking specifically for you .. I couldn't tell what market you serve.

In my opinion, it's critical to give people a reason to stay at the site ...and making it easy for them to identify what you do, and where you do it .... is a solid first step.

Cheers .. Dave

I don't have the flash plugin (and refuse to install it) so your site doesn't work for me.

I don't know how many others there are like me; so I'm not saying change your entire site to suit *my* needs, though its worth investigating how many others cannot/do not want to use flash.

doubletime - I really don't think there are many people out there like you who refuse to install the flash plugin. There are no known security issues with flash. Many popular web sites use flash - such as CNN.com, NBC.com, ABC.com, and CBS.com just to name a few.

By the way, with your site I had to change my resolution to 1280 x 960 or higher to fit everything on the screen. According to my stats, about 70% of people use a lower resolution. You might want to look into fixing that.

Hi Ben,
Within ten seconds, I can't see the cities you serve. Maybe the top banner could have a slogan or copy noting that you're the real estate experts in .... On property listings there are two homes one in MN one in FLA, adding to the confusion. I believe trying to be all things to all people is a mistake in strategy. I would more clearly target your audience, I think your response rate will go up if you do that. Otherwise the look is fine and clean. If it weren't for your name up top, I'd think I was on a homegain/lead aggregator type site with general, but not specific info on real estate.

massprospector - Thanks for the feedback. The home in Florida is for a collegue of mine, which I also designed that site. I guess our service area seemed pretty obvious to me with having the map of Minnesota on the main page. It would also help if you knew that I also have the domain:

http://www.MNhousehunt.com

Without many paragraphs of home page content, the site will never do well in the SERPs.

Site looks very professioanl.

One thing , that I dont like is that I can not change the size of font.

Looks great, I see where everyone is coming from with the not sure where you work/ what you do. The only thing I would change would be to make somting indicating you are a realtor bigger. Because for a site that nice it would really stink to get an email that said somthing like "nice site thanks for the info can you recomend a good realtor"

Just my 2 cents

James
www.myfirstyearinrealestate.com
www.jameskaleda.com
www.jamessells.com
www.eastonparealestate.com
www.EastonPAHomes.com
www.westeaston.com

I think it's a cool site. Honestly, it took about 10 seconds to load the site on my cable modem which isn't a deal breaker but it might put off a dial up person...(why I still have to mention dial up in this day and age is beyond me)

Other than that, I do agree with one of the earlier posts that it's hard to know exactly what you do when the site first launches.

I have heard that people visit Realtors sites to look at houses, period. That's why it drives me nuts to see images of Realtors splashed across their front page - thankfully, you didn't do that, otherwise my critique would have gone into a whole new realm. Overall, I think you are heading in the right direction. My suggestion might be to cull from numerous findings and studies on what buyers and sellers look for on an agents site and implement the ones that work for you.

Overall:

Home Page: C-
Speed of page load: A
Made me want more information: C-
Lead generation: D
Overall site appearance: A+
Ease of use: A
"Sticky-ness" - something that I would mark the site and return in the future: C
MLS Search Feature: A-

My .02 (and that's exactly what it's worth)

I've been in the IT field for years and evened managed a webteam of 5 developers. I have to say the sight looks really nice, however the flash is a deterent for anyone using dial-up or is used to have pages pop up quick. Its all about the customers speedy experience, not necessarily about the razzles and dazzles.

I too dislike the audio effects -- other than that nice looking site.

Q...

The site looks like a candy. It's really good.
But as for the search - it's a bit inconvenient- too many different points to search by.
Here is what I did with my site. I used a US flash map to browse & search. This flash map gives a view of the states & counties. The counties are clickable. A click takes you to one of the pages with information about that county.
I say it's really great. besides it looks good. I customized all the colors myself!
unfortunately my page is unavailable now. But here is the page where I got the map:
http://www.usflashmap.com/products/real_estate_maps/professional_flash_map.htm
and one more:
http://www.usflashmap.com/products/real_estate_maps/us_flash_map.htm