Help Needed Testing New Site

[hmilesjr]

Hi everyone. We are just about finished with our new network of real estate websites focusing on waterfront, lake, river, and ocean property. The programmers have finished writing all the code and we are finishing the final design template now (we had given the programmers a basic template to work off of while we were designing the sites design).

We need 50 or so agents whom have waterfront (or property in waterfront, lake, river, or ocean communities) listings to do some testing so we can work out any final bugs. Basically all we need is for you to register, login, and post a minimum of 5 ads (these need to be real ads as they will go live once we start our ad campaign August 1st). All the agents whom partcipate will receive a free 12 month membership to the site and a featured agent upgrade.

Benefits of our system include free bio pages, contact forms, email a friend feature, up to 10 photo upload, url backlinks on every listing, listings appear on up to 7 websites for maximum exposure and much more.

If you are willing to help us with testing please email me and I will get you the information and url. If you have questions or comments please PM me or post them here for everyone to read.

[koitech]

you havn't given the url of your website. Please give the url of your website
so that i can see your site and can test it. or you haven't uploaded it yet??

[hmilesjr]

Ok, thank you to all of those who have responded. We still need agents willing to help us test our new site. In exchange will give you one year of free service and a featured agent upgrade. If you would like to partcipate or just give us feedback (good o bad) we would appreciate the effort. The website URL is http://www.waterfronthousesusa.com

[jasoncrouch]

Are there specific areas of the site that you would like for us to test? Or were you looking for design tips as well? I would be happy to help.

[hmilesjr]

Jason,

I mainly need agents to signup and post property listings and comment to me about things that they like and what could be improved on. I am also looking for design tips, suggestions for features, etc. I will give anyone who signs up and participates a free 1 year membership for their time and effort.

[jasoncrouch]

I am still interested in helping, but I don't have any current waterfront listings. Should/could I post some other listings?

[Malok]

I don't see any location that would be appropriate for non-waterfront listings in that site.

[hmilesjr]

The locations are in the backend. I did not want a bunch of empty pages in the frontend. As listings are posted, the areas show up. We have 4800 areas input already, but if we don't have the area we can add it.

Jason, pm me the areas you service. Properties do not have to be waterfront. As long as the properties are in areas such as lake, river, or ocean communities with access the lake, river, or the ocean. Access could be a public.

[jasoncrouch]

I know this may sound dumb, but I can't actually figure out how to PM you. I tried to email you from your profile, but it said that you are not accepting messages in this way.

I do have a listing with community lake access that would probably work well for your site.

[wdonovan]

If I had anything negative to say about your site, it's that the double-header bar is confusing and the whole heading space is enormous. To that end, the top header bar is attractive while the bottom one is green and ugly. I think it's the font, but it's weird because I'm on a Mac and generally web-fonts look better on a Mac.

So that leads me to think it's more an aesthetic thing, coupled with what I see is a problematic eye-contact "heat" issue: As Google has shown, the sweet spot of a site is to the middle and left of middle of a page. On your site, it's hard to distinguish what's really "important" on the front end.

Interestingly, once I scroll down past the top, suddenly things come into context.

Hope that helps!

If you can, try and retool the top of the front page to be more like the three-column look half-way down your front page. There's just too much going on and I think aesthetically and simultaneously from a 'work-flow' perspective, context is getting lost.