Ok, I am finally about 95% done with my webpage. I welcome ALL comments.

Thanks!

www.mikevolkin.com

Mike,
Nice site...It's well laid out with a clean look. Now, you have to get the SE to find you! I noticed that your "title" was just your name. That needs to be changed to your selling areas. Also, you have no keywords or description for your site. If you don't change that no one will ever find your site on the web.

Well don't get too concerned with META keywords and descriptions. They're not really important these days. Your title is better than most, but it would be best if you incorporated a keyword you were targeting.

Your site has a nice, clean look to it. More important, it does not look like a typical cookie-cutter site. Congrats on that one!

Navigation wise - it's easy to get around your site. Menus are clear and for the most part intuitive.

The one thing that jumped out at me was that I have no idea where you are selling property. OK, if I really look hard I can see that you're in CA.

From an engineering standpoint, you should take the time to validate your HTML . When you validate you HTML and validate your CSS it helps to ensure cross browser capability (although you may still need to tweak or hack your CSS).

From a content standpoint, there really is no content. Your site does not give me any insights to the communities that you service. Sure, there are outbound links - but that takes me away from your site. Now, if you had content with your insights, that helps to let me know that you are a real estate expert in your area.

SEO wise - the site will not rank well or garner search engine traffic.

You have made a good start on your site.

thanks golf guy. I know i still have work to do, but i wanted to get SOMETHING up for now, a shell. Next week i will have to start working on the more advanced stuff that you mentioned. thanks again

Looks great, one suggestion.. the main reason you want people on your site is to reivew homes available and contact you for information on them. We would make the SEARCH homes link stand out larger or more predominant than the other ones. It looks great.. your site looks clean, and well organized. It's nice to have all the other stuff on your site, but don't forget the main reason you have them there is to look at your listings and inquire about them.
Good luck...

good point. thanks!

A few quick things I noticed.

You use "CLICK HERE" for the anchor text on a lot of your links. You'd be much better off using things like "About Me" for the link to the page about you and "Articles" for the link to the page with articles.

Have you considered changing "Home Worth" to "Home Value"?

Are you making use of good page structure through the use of

,

,

etc. tags?

What other type of SEO have you done?

Basic assessment (search engine simulation):

Page title = 2/2
Page Description = 1/1
Keywords = 1/1
H1 tags (None) = 0/1
Number of images 8
Image descriptions 0 descriptions; all the images are missing ALT attributes! = 0/5
HTML size 11204 bytes - 11k = 5/5
Total size 348411 bytes - 341k = 1/5
Retrieval time 1 second = 5/5
Body text (147 words in total) = 1/2
Links (8 found, text-based) = 1/2
Total score: 59%

Biggest issues:
No H1 text
No images have descriptions
Total page (with images) is large (341k)
More text based content required


Overall:
I think the website is appealing to the majority, maybe fix up a bit of pixelation in the title, put in a background color in the header so whilst the image is loading visitors can see the page title clearly and it would be a good idea to put the sitemap link down the bottle in plain text next to the contact link.

for web browsing i use firefox mozilla rather than internet explorer. On the tabs of the browser, i see small icons like for google there's a "G". How did you make your icon say "M/V"?

It's called a favicon.ico file that you create and place on your site. Many sites give instructions on making one, here's one:

http://www.chami.com/html-kit/services/favicon/

Great job, overall.
Two quick observations:

1. Not everyone uses Internet Explorer. You're "registered" (r) symbol is not rendering correctly in fire fox. Go to http://www.w3schools.com and look up the correct element tag.

2. Your title is nice, but something about it doesn't look quite right. I think maybe it didn't scale well. Maybe you can make it a little bigger?

Again, I'm nitpicking, great job.

The tag line on the top looks really bad now. The letters are not smooth at all - a fairly easy fix with an image editor program. Otherwise it is easy to nagigate.

-Ben
www.MNhousehunt.com

I think the header should be a solid color, not a tiled image so you can put a good logo in there. Off to a good start though.

I like the site pic seems a bit pixilated. How do you plan to market/work the FSBO page

James


www.firstyearinrealestate.com
www.jameskaleda.com
www.jamessells.com
www.eastonparealestate.com
www.EastonPAHomes.com
www.westeaston.com

Nice site! Good PR! one of the things i see wrong is on the bottom theres to much empty space fill that up with adsense or something else of what you offer. Don't leave to much empty space like that but also don't make it too crowded.

Also when i first click on the site the first 5 seconds of being there I should know what this site is for. I couldn't tell and still dont' no you should make that more obvious.

Hope this helps.

Mike,

Here's what's good about your site:
1. No scrolling on the home page - visitors hate that.
2. Your name and picture are the first things that will be read -- websites are read like books, top to bottom, left to right.
3. Your business "philosophy" -- Live Bigger, Move Smarter -- is good branding.

Here are some criticism from someone who's worked with over 100 Realtor websites from coast to coast:
1. Pictures need to be crisp (Minimum 96dpi).
2. The options blend together since they all use the same font, color, etc. Remember, you'll only get about 10-20 seconds from most visitors until they get frustrated and go to another site.
3. Your location is the last thing visitors will read since it's in the bottom right corner. Try to put Sacramento, El Dorado, and Folsom more at the beginning -- preferably above your picture if possible.
4. Your sitemap should be an .xml file, not an .htm/l if you can help it.
5. Red/yellow/orange are confrontational colors. Try to avoid them unless they're part of your branding/marketing. I think the only brokerage in Sacramento that uses red is Lyon -- even REMAX offsets the red in its logo with a cool blue. This might seem picky, but remember that a lot of visitors will see your site at night, in a darkened room, after looking at other sites with "cooler" colors for hours -- that much red could be a shock that will cause them to click the "x".

One thing I noticed is that you don't have an IDX solution for MLS listings. My company offers the iHomeFinder IDX solution at $49 per month with $0 set-up. If you can find a better price, take it.

You should also track visitors within your site. Find out how long they stay on each page, where they go to from the home page, and what pages are exit pages. This information will help you decide which pages to highlight and which that need revision.

Hope this helps.

Hi Mike -

This is coming from a designers perspective, one who owns a rather successful design studio.

In my opinion the site looks amateurish. It doesn't have the clean and sharp look of a professional design. Perhaps, to avoid high costs, you may want to consider having a designer put together a template for you.

This way you could have the look of a professional site while not necessarily incurring all of the costs.

Just a thought!

Have a great one,
Vernon