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andresz
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Costa Rica Real Estate Website???? - 9/24/2004 1:11:36
Hi.
I am a realtor (not a webmaster) and I have been trying to have my own website www.andresz.com . Actually is running OK in terms of search results but I know is maybe the heaviest not just in load time but in listings in the country (I like to put everything in the homepage) and I want to know the opinion of the experts. Thanks for any critique or suggestion.!
Pura Vida
Andres
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halabourda
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From: Vancouver, Canada.
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RE: Costa Rica Real Estate Website???? - 9/24/2004 1:42:14
Just a simple first observation is the very bold blue you use in your cells, under the various 'listings' pages. I'd suggest softening the hue.
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Peppergal
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RE: Costa Rica Real Estate Website???? - 9/24/2004 2:08:49
Hi There and welcome to Outfront.
My first suggestion is to NOT put everything on the first page. Have a different page for each category and also, I would suggest limiting the amount of listings you put per page. One of my biggest aggravations when visiting real estate sites is waiting for all the pictures to load. I would put a FEW select listings on the front page and rotate these occasionally (every o couple of weeks or so)
Eliminate any blinking stuff...it's distracting. (I have a couple realtor clients though who want it. Sigh...I haven't convinced them yet. LOL)
You have way way way too much info on one page....I can't stress it enough - break it up into more easily digested chunks. Your first page should be an introduction of who you are and why people should choose you above all your other competitors.
Your header graphic is really nice!
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Northeast PA / Poconos/ Lake Wallenpaupack Real Estate
wallenpaupacklakeproperty.com
Karen's Real Estate Blog
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Giomanach
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RE: Costa Rica Real Estate Website???? - 9/24/2004 3:38:56
quote:
Your header graphic is really nice!
Yep, and no offence...but the rst ruins it...
I'll try not to be too harsh, I'm guessing this is your first site?
1) NO MUSIC!!!! - I was quite happily listening to "A Higher State Of Euphoria"...and all of a sudden over it comes this cheesy, tacky, jamaican steel drums sounding thing....lose it...it's not very nice...
2) As Karen has said....too much in the first page...I'm on a 2MB connection here, and it still takes a good 30 seconds to load everything.
3) No Marquees or moving stuff.....not good on the eyes...and it drives em round the twist.
4) Left hand nav...Nope...doesn't work for me.Too much....the graphics dotted about in it do nothing for it. Lose the graphics and give the links some style!
5) I can't read the copyright info...and I have better than perfect vision!
6) Too much JavaScript, I understand its for the nav...but it's not Search Engine friendly....You need to choose another one.
7) Lose the page transitions
8) The music is driving me nuts!
Andres, I'm not saying that it's a failure, but let Karen do it for you, the majority of her clients are realtors, and she has produced some superb webs for them. I'd do it, but I'm tied up at the mo with a fairly large project....(this one)
Hope I wasn't too harsh, and not offensive in anyway
Dan
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d a v e
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RE: Costa Rica Real Estate Website???? - 9/24/2004 8:59:40
1.8 Mb isn't fun on a modem, well you could wait half and hour-1 hour and come back and ask :)
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David Prescott
Gekko web design
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Peppergal
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RE: Costa Rica Real Estate Website???? - 9/24/2004 9:32:42
quote:
Andres, I'm not saying that it's a failure, but let Karen do it for you,
well thanks for the plug dan but I'm up to my eyeballs in projects at the moment. LOL
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Northeast PA / Poconos/ Lake Wallenpaupack Real Estate
wallenpaupacklakeproperty.com
Karen's Real Estate Blog
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dpf
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RE: Costa Rica Real Estate Website???? - 9/24/2004 10:25:12
quote:
I can't stress it enough
I cant either!!!!!!!!
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Dan
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krsaborio
Posts: 13
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From: San Jose, Costa Rica
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RE: Costa Rica Real Estate Website???? - 10/19/2004 20:43:11
Since 1999, I've done Web development in Costa Rica.
Today, I was checking the ranking of the Web sites I helped develop under the phrase "costa rica real estate". Among the results, I found www.frontpagewebmaster.com. Pretty nice and comprehensive forum.
Since most Web developers that post in this forum are busy with projects, I'll be glad to help. I've been quite successful developing real estate Web sites for RE/MAX in Costa Rica.
So send me an e-mail. On the left, click on krsaborio (first, you need to register) to see my profile and contact information.
< Message edited by krsaborio -- 10/21/2004 12:27:38 >
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krsaborio
Posts: 13
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RE: Costa Rica Real Estate Website???? - 10/19/2004 21:07:38
Let me share the following article with Andres. Eventhough it was written in 1998, all the advice is still valid today. Please make sure you read "LESSON LEARNED" at the end of the article.
Tips from the Microsoft Webmasters
How they evolved their site from an FTP server to a complex public data center.
By Sandra Gittlen
Network World Fusion, 5/4/98
When the launch of Internet Explorer sent Microsoft Corp.'s Web site to its knees last year, the people running the site wiped the dirt off and looked to their next big challenge - the launch of Windows 98.
The team that runs microsoft.com - one of the most visited sites on the Internet - has faced a lot of challenges in its three-year existence. They've come a long way from the days when the entire site resided on a single server under one employee's desk that would crash whenever somebody accidentally kicked it.
The release of Windows 98, slated for this summer, is expected to double the 190 million hits the site currently receives each day, according to Tim Sinclair, editor in chief of microsoft.com. Unlike with IE 4.0, users will not be downloading megabytes of applications at a time, but will instead be looking for product and upgrade information and support. Still, Microsoft is taking no chances. To prepare, microsoft.com is moving into a new data center, setting up international mirror sites and running exhaustive usability tests.
The 20-person team has been working for the past few months to shore up every possible break point in the Web site's system: from content development to posting to client-side viewing.
Consider the magnitude of the site already. Microsoft.com has more than 1 million users worldwide, a number that grows more than 8% each month. International audiences make up the fastest growing group of users. Of the site's 250,000 pages of content, more than 10% changes daily. New content is posted to the site eight times a day.
These are heady statistics for a team that little over a year ago thought 50,000 visitors a day was an incredible audience.
"We've come a long way," Sinclair says simply. And he's not kidding.
The Death Star
In 1994, Bill Gates issued his now famous Internet memo to Microsoft employees: The Internet, he wrote, was to become the focus of everything Microsoft did. In 1995, he announced this new focus to the world at Fall Comdex in Las Vegas.
Before that speech, microsoft.com was an FTP site run by the company's product and support services group, Sinclair said. "Patches were offered to customers through the site. It had minimal HTML content."
The home page consisted of a single image map, with links to content and FTP sites, that looked like the "Death Star," according to Kari Richardson, group producer for microsoft.com. It was, to say the least, unattractive.
"The Internet rush had not started yet," Richardson said. "When we first got started, Web-based products weren't out there. It was like the Wild, Wild West. It was really shoot from the hip."
After Gates' initial decree, the rush was on to prep a site for the launch of Windows 95. With the Internet Explorer browser now included as part of the announcement, Microsoft put pressure on site developers to showcase what the product could do. The company created a separate department to run the site, reporting directly to Executive Vice President Steve Ballmer.
But this was also the time when Microsoft was getting ready to launch the Microsoft Network, an ambitious America Online competitor based on proprietary software.
Although The Microsoft Network, Microsoft's online service, was going full-steam at that time, it was not a place "where we thought about products," Sinclair said. The Microsoft Network is subscription-only and focused on content, whereas microsoft.com serves as a free informational area for Microsoft products and services. "Steve said we need a Web site for sales and marketing." Therefore, he wanted control of the Web site "moved under his wing."
In August, 1995, the new microsoft.com had its official launch. Gone was the hideous image map. In its place: a text-filled home page with the now-ubiquitous "Where do you want to go today?" slogan plastered on it.
"By then we were more pioneering," Richardson said. "We began to plan things out."
Some things, however, still popped up by chance.
The tool bar, which is one of the few bits of code the Web team requires content providers to put on each page, was developed on the fly. While at a Professional Developers Conference, they all started playing around with Photoshop on a laptop. They knew the site needed a tool bar and started to design it. According to Richardson, the one they came up with that day, consisting of white type in plain black boxes, has not changed that much since then.
The team borrowed a basic concept from Microsoft's existing Windows applications - a top toolbar that remained basically the same from one page to another. The idea was to give users a familiar navigational aid and to help reinforce the site's identity, Richardson said.
As more people visited the site, Microsoft poured more content onto it. The result: Serious problems as the servers struggled under the load.
"We moved from being a server in somebody's office to a data center," Sinclair said. "But we still had a crisis mentality. It was 'the Web site's down' and everybody started running. There were a lot of sleepless nights."
Sinclair became increasingly frustrated, especially because he had no way to predict imminent problems. "Even when I lived in Texas, you could detect a tornado 30 minutes before it happened," he said.
Sharing the load
One of the things that bogged down the team was content. It was responsible for writing and publishing all content - a gigantic task at a company as large as Microsoft.
"Microsoft up to that point had been a technology company good at marketing," said Lyn Watts, editor of microsoft.com. "Now it needed a publishing mentality."
The team switched gears. It no longer focused on technical expertise. Instead, Watts and others were brought on board for their editorial knowhow. Watts, a veteran of the local Tacoma, Wash., newspaper, was hired to shape up the site's content. His main focus became the home page.
"Microsoft needed people to make clear what is technical," Watts said.
Watts said that Microsoft is unique in that it has to consider a range of users: from the home user with a brand-new computer to the pinnacle of technical savvy; from developers in the U.S. to those overseas.
"When I came to Microsoft, editorial content was an afterthought," he said. "Now every group contributes to it."
Sinclair agreed, saying a year ago, Gates made quality content on the site a priority.
"We used to work long hours so it was easier to put something up by mistake," Richardson said. "We had grammar and spelling errors. Remember, HTML editors at that time didn't have spell checkers."
Team members attribute part of the increase in quality to the automation of processes. The fewer hands actually touching the pages, the fewer errors, Richardson said.
To focus more on quality, the team adopted a decentralized publishing model. Product groups developed their own content, through outside agencies or in-house.
"We do not act as a content resource," Watts said.
Instead, the team worked on improving the home page and the front page of each product's site. All subsequent pages were left to the product groups.
To assure that all content providers, including the Microsoft Web site managers overseas, are accessing the same information, the Web team has opened a site on the intranet to post updates. This internal site features style discussions, code samples and tips on how to get your pages noticed by readers. The intranet site also features step-by-step guides to posting content that is updated regularly.
And although the team wants to remain mostly hands-off, it has posted general templates, including the toolbar, for consistency.
"Having the intranet makes content publishing 90% self serve," Sinclair said.
To build and publish the content, product groups use a variety of HTML editors, including Microsoft's FrontPage, Visual InterDev and Allaire Corp.'s HomeSite. They also can use database programs and registration wizards such as SQL Server or Active Server Pages.
Using PubWiz, an internally developed product, content providers can send their pages to the staging server for testing. The microsoft.com team, through automatic programs, check links spell-check content and test the interoperability of pages. Then, at allotted times throughout the day, the pages are automatically moved from the internal Web server to the live server.
Once pages are live, and sometimes before, they are tested with sample users. Microsoft invites people in to a lab to click through the site, performing various tasks along the way. This is so developers can tweak the site, depending on what users are finding difficult and confusing, said Amy Benton, producer of microsoft.com.
Internally, product groups meet with Watts to tell him what isn't working. "We have a lot of armchair Webmasters," Sinclair said.
Pages are also tested for compatibility with various browsers, including older versions.
"Even though there are only about 10,000 hits each day from text-only browsers, we still want to support those users," Watts said. Currently, there are three different versions of the site available: text-only, HTML and Dynamic HTML. Microsoft.com uses cookies to remember what version a user prefers.
The DHTML version highlights what Internet Explorer 4.0 can do with the new technology, Watts said. For example, users can personalize the site to bring up only content of immediate interest to them.
In addition to technically maneuvering the pages a user sees, content providers across the globe translate and localize information for various geographic regions. Sinclair has a team of more than 400 people worldwide that runs the company's 52 international sites, he said.
The technical side
While microsoft.com is suffering growing pains editorially, it also is experiencing them on the technical side. The launch of Internet Explorer 4.0 pushed the site to its limit, forcing the team to make major infrastructure adjustments before the Windows 98 release.
Once powered by two servers, microsoft.com is now 70-servers strong. To account for the intense growth, microsoft.com next month will complete its move to new headquarters. The site is moving its data center from the cramped confines of a local carrier point of presence in Bellevue, Wash., to a new building in Bothell, about 30 miles outside of Redmond. Also housed in the new location, which is expected to be completed by next month, will be the Microsoft Network and other company Internet ventures.
A completely Compaq-running-Windows NT setup, the new data center resembles NASA headquarters, with a large video screen dominating the room. The screen features a blown-up version of the monitoring screen, as well as news and weather channels to see where outages might occur. The center will be monitored 24x7 and has a help desk for the company's worldwide sites. The monitoring system was developed by the microsoft.com team and is now shipping with Internet Information Server (IIS), Sinclair said. The servers also are running IIS 4.0 and SQL Server. Load balancing is performed by splitting up the minisites, such as BackOffice and Games, among the servers, making sure that pages within a site are funneled to several different Web servers.
"This data center is supposed to showcase what NT can do," said Richard Beers, operations manager at the Bothell facility.
The facility boasts three times the bandwidth of the old POP. It also has OC-12 pipes, up from the OC-3s in the Bellevue facility. The company uses ATM for uplinks and Ethernet/Fast Ethernet for downlinks. Because the Pacific Northwest is prone to power outages, Microsoft has power agreements with two companies and three backup generators. Pages are propagated to the live server over a synchronous optical network (SONET).
To help users access pages faster, microsoft.com set up two mirror sites in London and Tokyo. Users can choose which site they would like to access, Sinclair said.
Microsoft boosted performance for international customers because this is where the site is seeing the most growth, Sinclair said. He added that with more than 50% of Microsoft's revenue coming from overseas, providing quick access to site services seems appropriate.
Getting it together
Even with all the work they've put into the site, team members still say there is more to do.
"We've got great tools for monitoring what people do on the site," Sinclair said. "We just don't know what they came to do." Gathering that information is next on his list of projects.
Sinclair uses SQL Server to keep logs about visitors and their travels through the site. That information is shared with product groups so they know what to improve on their sites.
Watts said he is working with site developers to create a version of the site that allows users to personalize it.
Benton said her next effort will be to switch the search engine from Index Server to Site Server. Site Server, she said, allows site managers to create site-specific word searches. Benton also is looking at site indexing and mapping to see which would make navigation easier for users to find what they want.
LESSONS LEARNED
The microsoft.com team has learned a lot in its short life. Since its days as an FTP site for product patches to its official launch to today, the Web team is quick to come with a list of tips for Webmasters.
-->> Avoid image maps. In addition to being klunky, they are difficult to update. If one thing is wrong, the whole map needs to be altered. "Alt" statements for users without graphics are also tricky with image maps.
Don't use frames. Some browsers don't support them and printing framed pages is difficult. Instead, go for a framed look using tables.
--->> Stay away from large graphics. They take too long to download and, depending on browser, can extend beyond the bottom of the initial screen.
Don't embed text into graphics. The resulting images take longer to download than a combination of graphics and HTML text. For sites that customize content for international users, this can cause headaches when trying to use different languages.
--->> Always use "alt" statements in image tags. Many users turn off their images and, therefore, rely on these statements to tell them what they are missing.
-->> Avoid large pages. Try not to go over 100K bytes. Even better is to stay in the 30K-to-50K-byte range.
Use a mix of text and graphics. Text-only is boring for readers with graphics turned on and they won't dig down in your site.
-->> Use graphics smartly and judiciously. Make sure you know what you want from the graphic, whether it be to add to the text or substitute for it. Avoid screenshots unless you can make them clear enough to read.
-->> Test your site often. Make sure that everything is linked properly and that its easy to get around. Click through yourself and have other do the same.
-->> Don't use technology for technology's sake. If most of the people can't see what you're trying to do, then it's not worth it. Stick to what most browsers can handle.
Copyright, 1998 Network World, Inc. All rights reserved.
< Message edited by krsaborio -- 10/19/2004 21:54:52 >
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dpf
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RE: Costa Rica Real Estate Website???? - 10/19/2004 21:11:59
am I missing something here? I dont get the point.
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Dan
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krsaborio
Posts: 13
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RE: Costa Rica Real Estate Website???? - 10/19/2004 21:15:28
Read "LESSONS LEARNED" at the end of the article.
< Message edited by krsaborio -- 10/19/2004 21:42:24 >
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dpf
Posts: 7121
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RE: Costa Rica Real Estate--my 2 cents and Real Estate ... - 10/24/2004 11:40:02
Vipin: look at your home page and then your next pages. the colors are totally different and lose continuity. think the home page does notw rok..too busy and too blue..i like the other pages better.
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Peppergal
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RE: Costa Rica Real Estate--my 2 cents and Real Estate ... - 10/24/2004 21:49:33
I think you should start your own thread.
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wallenpaupacklakeproperty.com
Karen's Real Estate Blog
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krsaborio
Posts: 13
Joined: 10/19/2004
From: San Jose, Costa Rica
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RE: Costa Rica Real Estate--New Web site design - 5/13/2006 21:40:38
A few weeks ago, I redesigned http://www.remaxlider.com/ .
I put a lot of emphasis on avoiding possible penalties from engines like Google. Therefore, I decided to use a simple design plus easy navigation menu. I avoided fancy logos and other graphical enhancements.
I'm competing with a few sites to obtain placement in search engines for the phrase costa rica real estate. I did check those Web sites before deploying the current design for www.remaxlider.com .
Since such a good input was given for www.andresz.com , I just wanted to see what kind of feedback I can get on my new project.
Cheers from Costa Rica in Central America.
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krsaborio
Posts: 13
Joined: 10/19/2004
From: San Jose, Costa Rica
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RE: Costa Rica Real Estate--New Web site design - 6/13/2006 12:44:25
Based on some suggestions from above, I have started my own thread at
http://www.frontpagewebmaster.com/m-328830/tm.htm
Thank you.
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phoon
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RE: Costa Rica Real Estate Website???? - 4/11/2008 13:20:47
hello,
The colors of your web page are very complimentary. I had no problem finding out what the site is trying to sell. I have a problem with the length of the page. Because there is, no navigation bar the user has to scroll up and down and is very difficult to find out where they are located on the page. If the user wants to come back to the site and find out more information, they will have to scroll down the page to find it. By giving unique names to each section and linking that section to the part of the page, it will make it easier for the user to access the information when they need to find out more information when the user returns to view your page.
This critique is based on information that I have learned in my E-commerce course.
I hope this helps,
Phoon
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caz
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RE: Costa Rica Real Estate Website???? - 4/11/2008 14:00:06
Hello phoon, have you noticed how old this thread is?
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