Web Site Design and Development

It makes him all soggy and hard to light.

For the past couple of days I’ve been troubleshooting my Internet connection, which appears to have decided not to behave reliably any more.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say I’ve solved it, since it’s behaving reliably now, but it’ll take another day or two to be sure.

Here are words of wisdom from an amateur network admin: 95% of the time, it’s a cable problem.

I’m pleased to announce that I’m currently beginning work on a blog installation and training program for for Peter Thompson, a Chicago Loan Officer.  Peter and I met through a comment I made on ActiveRain and we hit it off right away, because I was able to provide him with a low cost and personalized set of services to:

• Improve the Search Engine Optimization of his existing web site.
• Research effective key words to use for his web site and blog.
• Install a Wordpress blog based on a standard template, with some customization to the template.
• Suggest strategies for blogging topics, attracting more visitors (both customers and colleagues that can contribute to the blog’s success), etc.

Based on some of the writing I’ve seen from him both on his newly launched site and his Active Rain blog and his “in it for the long haul” attitude, I expect that it won’t be long before his new blog will ultimately serve as a major resource for Illinois home finance information.

This week we look at some of the resources that can help make you a better blogger. 

Lately I’ve been finding that a lot of the best tips can be found on the general blogging sites, rather than on the sites about real estate blogging and the usual real estate social networks.

An excellent starting point for example is Darren Rowse’s series Blogging Tips for Beginners.

Another excellent resource for blogging advice is the Daily Blog Tips site, which has a very high ratio of posts that actually are, go figure, daily blog tips.

My favorite resource from the point of view of improving your blog writing is the CopyBlogger blog, which focuses on blogging as a special case of ad copy writing.

The last few days I’ve been getting a steady flow of traffic to the site. There haven’t been as many subscribers as I’d like to have yet, but in general I’ve been hearing from a lot of people and getting a few nice “keep up the good work emails.”

Even more encouraging, especially as I’m starting to talk about possible service offerings like my is the number of calls I’ve been getting from people who already have a real estate blog that they’ve purchased from another vendor and who’ve been picking my brain for solutions to problems the other vendor doesn’t provide.

A few things have become obvious in the course of these discussions:

• People are paying more than they should for separate web sites and blogging solutions. Given that I run several sites that successfully integrate IDX and Wordpress blogs, and given that I’m an IHomefinder reseller, I can compete on cost and still provide an excellent product.
• People are also paying a huge amount just to learn how to blog. Now granted, if you’re non-technical, there are some skills that need to be mastered, but I believe you can do a lot of this online with some combination of 1) the right tutorials and 2) online teleconferencing courses.

The other thing that’s also helping me sharpen up my service offerings has been thinking through some of the parts of my outline of a Real Estate Webmaster Training Course. As I was doing this, it became pretty apparent that I was probably getting into far too much depth on certain issues in my zeal to create a sort of “Help-U-Sell (Online)” discount model.

I probably had this “Every-Agent-A-Webmaster” zeal as an overreaction to that nagging question that I keep thinking about: You paid HOW MUCH AGAIN to learn how to use Wordpress ? ! ?

Probably there’s a way to cook this porridge so that it’s neither too hot nor to cold.

PS: It turns out I have had porridge. It’s just oatmeal. Who knew?

I spend quite a bit of time on a few different social networks. Most recently I’ve been reviewing Cre8Buzz here. Yet I don’t spend a lot of time on social networks because I think they’re productive, so as you can guess I think maybe I should be spending less time there. In general I think you get significantly more benefit from writing a blog post or page on a web site you control, as opposed to writing it on a social network. Still, like the proverbial glass of wine with dinner, most non-alcoholics won’t be too harmed by a moderate use of social networks, and may even derive a certain health benefit.

From a search perspective, content on a social network site has an important limitation that content on your own web site does not. This limitation is that your content may appear several links away from the main page. Because of this, even your profile page not be indexed by the search engine for some time after you’ve been active — let alone any brilliantly conceived blog posts you’re letting loose on the world. I’ve yet to see my Cre8Buzz Profile get indexed by either Yahoo or Google, for example.

In addition to being indexed slowly (if at all), although the the community may have collected considerable page rank, being several links away from the home page means that this value is likely to be watered down fairly thoroughly by the time it gets to you.

Let’s take the example of a blog. Let’s see how far away from the home page your blog appears in three different scenarios:

Scenario: Stand alone blog.
Links: 0. (By definition, in this case your home page is your blog).

Scenario: Integrated web site and blog.
Links: 1. (User comes to your home page, clicks on “Blog Link”, and there they are.

Scenario: ActiveRain. Assume you’ve been posting enough there that you’re on page one for your county. Otherwise add links.
Links: 4 Home –> State –> County –> Your Profile –> Your Blog

On the positive side, if you choose a real estate community (as opposed to a general community like Cre8Buzz), you get an advantage from being part of a huge site that has a great deal of “thematic content” about your subject. This would not be the case if you participate in a general community like Facebook or Cre8Buzz. I have also noticed that the search engines don’t seem to index content on the more general social networks as readily as they do the content on more theme-based sites.

The other positive benefit you derive from posting on social networks is the opportunity to provide some link love for your main web site or blog. However, it’s easy to overstate the benefit from this, since traditional wisdom is that the search engines like to see incoming links from a variety of sources. Thus, 10 blog posts on your main site with 10 incoming links from your ActiveRain blog are likely to receive less of a benefit than would 10 blog posts with 10 different sites linking to them. And remember, incoming links only count for reputation — in terms of page rank, a link is a link is a link, and a page on your web site or blog will naturally have a lot more internal links to different pages on your site, and fewer links pointing to the rest of someone else’s site.

I’ve been known to be somewhat ambivalent about Social networks (ya think?), and anyone who enjoy’s Andrew Keen is not a likely candidate to score very highly on the Web 2.0 hype-o-meter.

Having said that, I’m really getting quite a treat out of Web 2.0’s newest starchild, Cre8Buzz. Real Estate professionals can join here. (I’m not sure whether the general sign-up is open to the public yet or not. It was “invitation only” when I first visited). When you come by, be sure to visit me and say hello.

There’s an interesting ranking system, “Buzz Rank”, that combines other users voting for you and your own participation. If you use their widget, the score that’s published is your score within your community category, not your overall score for the site, which is kind of neat. OK, what can I say — I was the Lisa Simpson type of kid who liked to bring home “A’s” on my report card.

It’s still pretty new, so there’s a good chance the Antman will come by to say hello to you in person. Ants with megaphones — what’s not to love? Social network — cute.

Everyone to date has been pretty hail fellow well met with no special politics brewing yet.

Another thing I like — I mean I really like — is the fact that people aren’t contacting me to install the newest Facebook application. Being poked was silly enough, but getting Superpoked with a sheep thrown at you is just TOO IMMATURE. But ants with megaphones, on the other hand — that’s an age appropriate play group for me.

It has a customizable profile page a la Myspace, which I like since my alter-ego the real estate broker capitalist can put up the corporate logo and feel good about it. JavaScript widgets don’t work — tried that. Of course, the downside of customization is that you bump into the usual folks who have fairly unreadable pages with background images of light green aliens and foreground text that’s dark green 4 pixel high Old English Script italic or what have you. People, I know you’re all democratically broadcasting yourself and all, but readability matters.

My only real complaint so far, and I’m sure this’ll get fixed as time goes on, is the interface to the blog, which is primitive in the extreme. We’re talking you can’t yet code an HREF tag in there. It finds “http://” and does the right thing with that, but no links of a more sophisticated nature are allowed. Even some of the most basic formatting just doesn’t work. But what the heck — it’s a beta, and it’s a social networking web site, not a pacemaker, so as a programmer I get it.

OK, just one other thing. I know the developers are probably too young to know about this movie that was already sixteen years old when I watched it as a kid, but here’s the thing: ants don’t buzz. They make the Them! movie ant noise. If you’ve never heard that noise before, you really should go check out Them!. Watch the whole movie, or fast forward to about 27 minutes 30 seconds and you’ll not only get to watch Joan Weldon walking around, which is always a treat, but if you let it play about two minutes you’ll get to hear plenty of good ant noises.