My husband is a new real estate agent and I am heading that way when I take my test next week and I also do web design

Here are a couple of the projects I am working on.

If your looking for a custome template, I can also recommend a cheap and reliable host.

http://www.magneticwebdesign.com/mjelde.jpg

one that is in work
http://www.magneticwebdesign.com/pitt.jpg

everthing is custom no pre made templates. Nothing is reused.

Hrm, lots of images, text as images, probably lots of tables and spacer images. Not so great for SEO and overall usability and accessibility. Have you considered that?

That is just a jpg of the site not cut up.

True there is alot of images (mainly bottom, left, top) after its cut up but the text that are images are the buttons and the content parts are turned to background images and regular text is used for the greater part of the site.

For example here is one of my sites mostly images with content with plain text.
http://www.fraghqservers.com/

Load time is fast. Most really nice templates consist of images or flash.

I still think tables and spacer images are no good. Text as an image is bad too. Most templates that look "really nice" aren't very good for a lot of things.

I was just displaying some of the templates I can create. I work in photoshop daily and wanted to display some of my work.


The only Text as Images AKA buttons is the navigation bar the rest as I explained all the content is plain text.

boon,

In kind - Remember to run a spell check just before uploading your site. On your homepage you've missed spelled "benifits", should be "benefits".

Just-thought-you'd-wanna-know.

how could a table possibly be bad for SEO? have you checked some of the top ranking sites? most all sites are using tables. Frames are bad, tables are not bad.

just my .02 worth

later,

PS as for a good host, check my prices, very affordable, and superb support from design/programming/optimization
http://dosdawgs.com

Templated web sites can rank and so can flash based web sites, but it takes a lot more to get those featured in the SERPs than a customized web site utilizing search engine friendly coding. The top results featuring templated web sites show the determination of those webmasters doing the leg work, a lot less of which would be necessary had they spent a little extra money or time shopping around for the right web development service.

Any site can rank and rank well. Have that be a frame site, a table site, a pure css style site....

As long as the person working on the SEO knows what they are doing, everything will rank

You are possibly right but why fight yourself with a search engine hostile foundation. Its like building a house with cinder blocks that were made with sea water. It will last for a little while but you will have a hell of a job keeping up with repairs.

As far as templates go. Some templates, like Monster templates, are a horror. You can build a css/xhtml template with all the rich features of a user friendly, SEO optimized architecture. I do it all the time.

I have to agree 100% with what Frobn just stated.
I have seen some great templates but there is always the disadvantage of having 1 out of many sites with the exact same code which can possibly hold you back in your future rankings.

Several reasons. First, tables do not mean you can not get a good rank it just makes it harder. Tables are a design hack, their purpose is for tablular data, i.e. train schedules. They add bloat, high html to content ratio, and convolute the flow of content making it difficult for SEs to spider.

Css/xhtml provides greater access, usiblity, and cross browser compatibility. Even with all that the main reason to migrate away from tables is they are a dead end. PDAs, cell phones and other web devices will soon dominate and table based sites will not work with them.

i viewed your links, the code does look clean, but nowhere have i read about tables presenting a problem to spider other than here. i will investigate that. as for you mention that tables are a dead end, not everybody will use a web device in that nature. but i do like the cleanliness of the css/xhmtl. will start to try to migrate that way. css is kewl i have always like css, xhtml is something i have been tinkering with, but not got that involved, as i am a web programmer/developer, so there are parameters, in programming a dynamic site that are different from static sites. MO of course. i truly dont think portable devices are going to dominate the web, that might be an overstatement.

later,

Sometimes a picture is worth 1000 words. Not long ago I converted an open realty dynamic browse program to css. I am not a programmer. The program's fucntion is to list 10 property listings. The table version had 5 nested tables and 150 lines of code for each listing, the css version contains no tables and only 39 lines of code, a 75% reduction. You can see how they match up at: http://support.open-realty.org/showthread.php?t=3892

Look at the code for the table version and you can see the tortuous path that a SE would have to take, if it was able, to make sense of the content.

note: the site referenced is now broadwaykeys.com and is using an alpha version of OR 2. I plan to convert the browse function once OR 2 is out of beta.

Tables increase code-to-content ratio, that is they reduce keyword saturation, and add markup that's not needed with a tableless site. They also increase page weight, in terms of file size, which has it's own drawbacks.

Sites can rank well for a number of reasons, so don't be quick to assume that they're doing everything right.

I believe everything can be ranked regardless of code. Search engines seem like they would not include any code in their weighting of a website for ranking. If all the results were filled with "optimized" sites, then the content would more likely be less relevant and filled with SEO tricks. Anyways, thats my thought.

A lot of sites get ranked due to age and many other factors. Clean code does help though. It seems like whenever I look at the top ten results for any keyterm, I can find 8 different main reasons those are ranked.

Anyways, you can go ahead and set up your signature in here:
http://www.agentsonline.net/cgi-bin/bbs/ultimatebb.cgi/ubb/edit_my_profile.html

Mike

There is so much bad information and guessing in this thread, my advice to everyone that has read it is to ignore it and forget you every read it. Spend your time wisely reading an actual SEO website that doesn't have so much mis-information!

Hmmmmmmmmm

Bad information? What do you consider bad? General statements with no reference leave it up to the reader to fill in the blanks. If you are referring to my posts on this thread I for one would value your opinion of the "bad" information they contain. When someone goes to an SEO site the SEO by definition would like to sell his/her services, so I would consider much of the information on a SEO site "suspect." In a forum, as is evident on this thread, there are several views, some correct, some incorrect.

I would not recommend going to an "actual seo website" even though I would be interested in knowing which ones you were referring to.

I have yet to see a site run by an authority figgure in the business who does not give false information as well. I prefer discussion forums any day. Like Frobn said, it would be great if you could pinpoint some of the areas that you disagree with.

Thanks,

Mike

"When someone goes to an SEO site the SEO by definition would like to sell his/her services..."

There are many sites where they aren't selling anything, but are the watchdogs of search engines, giving advice and trying to predict the algo's without selling you anything.

Not everyone is trying to sell you something, but many people will give you free advice, which is usually worth what you paid for it! Hmmmmm... so that means my advice is worthless? maybe...

This is my favorite site for getting the straight dope: http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/ You may find it useful, or not... I don't care either way!