My website: SunBlest.net
I have an office leasing business in Tampa Florida. I receive 80% of my business from the street-sign, 10% from word-of-mouth & 10% from loopnet.com (a commercial real estate website).
I wrote a simple webpage to supply info for prospective tenants and the webpage is posted on my street-sign. I do not rely on this webpage to bring in business. Real estate websites are numerous, run by talented full-time website-developers - should I try investing lots of time into my webpage to obtain a great Google position, or will I be always behind the experts?
Here is the twist:
My hobby is weapons and history. My business website only uses 1% of the capacity, so I made my hobby-website there:
SunBlest.net/gun
This covers my research on Hungarian (and Austrian) weapons. It seems that the weapon pages got search engine popular quickly, (many top search engine ranks or 1st page ranks), which caused my business page to be indexed and ranked higher - is this possible or just an accident?
If I ran out of of this website's capacity, should I get the weapon pages a separate domain? Or just pay for a higher capacity?
General question:
Programming my weapons website I aimed for simplicity and offering lots of information, and easy overview of what the website covers. In your opinion, did I fail or did ok? Also, the top menu and the main page duplicates the same info - good or bad? Which one do you prefer to use?
Any other general comments/observations?
Last question:
I was contacted by an advertiser asking me how much I would want to rent a space (like 200x100 or 50x600) on the website for their ads. I have no idea - would anyone have a suggestion? Just e-mail the suggestion to perpetuum-mobile@juno.com if you do not want to post such info publicly.
Thank you

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Tampa Florida Office for Lease
Hungarian Weapons History

I am going to comment about your property website and not your hobby website.

1. Separate the two. Two different domains. A domain costs $10/yr to own. Website hosting can be had for $60/yr. Your property can afford that.

2. Remove the blue borders around the images.

3. Create a new favicon.

4. Use a real email address such as joe@propertyxyz.com and joe@juno. Show that you are serious about business.

5. Ditch the counter.

6. Add a map showing where the buildings are located.

7. Add more text. Google loves text and knows nothing about images.

8. Give each property its own page. Google likes focus.

9. Remove link to ManoWar as it is not a real estate related site.

10. Read BloodhoundBlog: Real estate marketing and technology blog | Realtors and real estate, mortgages, lending, investments to get ideas about marketing property.

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Dave Barnes
+1.303.744.9024
http://www.marketingtactics.com
sitting in my basement with my iMac

Everything is centered...very boring. Read Design Principle: Alignment - How Alignment Works in Web Page Layouts for ideas on different layouts.

I agree with the above comments. If you are going to try to make money from your website, it NEEDS to have it's own domain & own email address. It's just the professional thing to do.

Yellow & green text on a black background? OMG that is hard to read. Have you tried printing that page? I would reccomend sticking to light colored background and black/dark text.

It's very difficult to navigate that page as well. All the text & links just run together.

As far as how much to sell advertising space for I found this link, but it's aimed at blogs, though it should give you a good overview: How Much Should I Charge for my Advertising Space?

And here's another one MarketingProfs Knowledge Exchange : Selling ad space on a niche web site

Before charging for ad space, you need to know who your website caters to and what kind of traffic you have.

The spammers regularly kill off my domain e-mail addresses. I am not sure how to protect them. Juno has better filters, although they add their own spam.

I do have a link to a Mapquest map showing the building location, this also provides driving directions. Did you miss it or you are suggesting an additional permanent map on the page itself?

Thank you for the help and suggestions.

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Tampa Florida Office for Lease
Hungarian Weapons History

Thank you for the help.
An interesting link to web layouts. I cannot imagine using their most recommended layout for a more complicated webpage though.

I used to have my page left justified. As an engineer, I felt the page unbalanced so I added the centering. I am not an artistic person.

For comparison here is the same actual page:
Centered
Left Justified

Any opinions?

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Tampa Florida Office for Lease
Hungarian Weapons History

The biggest problem I see moving my website to a new domain is the loss of the excellent search engine page locations. It took me several years to get there.

The following refers to Manowar's Hungarian Weapons
I beg to differ on the black background screens. I have been using AutoCAD for a quarter century - with black background and colored text and graphics. With dimmed lights, this setup is actually much easier on the eye on the long run, than bright white screens. The brighter the screen, the more stressful it gets looking at it for a long time. Unfortunately most webpages are done in the bright, so dark backgrounds are rare and unpopular. Btw yellow & black provides the best color contrast combination. I do not know how black text on a yellow page would look!?

I choose the black background only for the main page, so it is obvious that the visitor returned to the main page. All important webpages are directly accessible from the main page. Also, all expected search words are on the main page. I am disappointed with my website that you have trouble navigating it. Is it only that the links run together or other problems?
The whole main page is duplicated by the screen-top pulldown menu. Did you try using it? Is the menu even visible on different platforms?

Thank you for any comments. The links you posted for the advertising charge pages are really helpful.

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Tampa Florida Office for Lease
Hungarian Weapons History