I would appreciate your view. LakeRealty.com is site of Lake Realty of Charlotte-Lake Norman NC, near Charlotte NC - home of the Carolina Panthers. I have several standard template sites but do not get much traffic. I built this site to be look different, to offer substantial info and to have general buyers. I am getting about 4500 unique sessions per month.
Thanks
Frank

Tested in IE6 56k modem 800x600. Seems a little slow to load. Might be nice if the links changed colour when the mouse is passed over them. Slightly too wide for 800x600. Graphic at the top doesn't seem to want to load. Opening screen doesn't really grab the reader and tells them what the site is about - some of the content lower down perhaps needs to be brought to the top of the page. A good solid design though. Good luck with it.

Nick

I think there are two really high-level problems here, and they are somewhat complementary.

First, there's the problem of layout. Where does the eye go first on this page (and where did you really want it to go first)? Where does the eye naturally go next (and where did you really want it to go next)? I'm pretty sure you did not intend the experience I had, which is that "lake levels" is the most important thing to read first on your home page.

If you step back a few yards from your home page, you can see that it's kind of a shotgun blast. There's four columns some places, two big columns elsewhere, a big blank square in the upper right corner, some things left aligned, some centered, and just kind of lack of overall visual coherence. Again, this matters not because you need to be artistic and high-falutin', but because you want to control where the visitor's eye goes first, where it goes from there, and so on. You want visitors to easily find what they most likely want, because otherwise it's very easy for them to go elsewhere to look for it. The visual layout plays a crucial role in determining whether it is easy or hard for a visitor to find what they're looking for.

For this first problem, I highly recommend "The Non-Designers Web Book", by Williams and Tollett. Simple, down-to-earth advice on what to do to make the elements on your web page work visually.

The second problem interacts with the first. It is the problem of priorities. The cure for this is to sit down with pencil and paper and write down the tasks that people come to your website to perform. At first, just write them all down. You might end up with things like this:

• Look up the Lake Realty phone number.
• Search for homes that match some criteria.
• Learn how to send email to Lake Realty.
• Learn more about a particular property you're handling.
• ( and surely several more... )

Once you've got this list, you have to ruthlessly prioritize it. Which task is the #1 most important thing to make easy for the visitor to do?

Once the list is priotized, go back to your current home page, and you should immediately see some problems. The size and placement of information on the home page should basically reflect the priorities you have set in your list of tasks that visitors come to perform. So, for example, you should immediately see that sending people off to the Better Business Bureau is probably something that doesn't belong on the top of the home page (and perhaps not on the home page at all).

You current home page is crammed with stuff and very large. If you start taking a task-based approach, you will be more inclined to stop thinking that the home page should do everything, and instead assume that the home page's job is to get them as quickly as possible to the page that is devoted to the particular task they came to perform.

I hope you find something useful in these comments. Good luck, and continued good traffic!

__________________
Relaxed Keyword Tracking