Hello All,

I'd appreciate any and all feedback on my Santa Barbara real estate website: www.TheZiaGroup.com. The site was built in Sept-Oct and we've been adding content ever since. The goal of the site is to capture leads (needs work), brand the company, act as a comprehensive online resource, and appeal to a wide audience (from home buyer to investors). The median price of a home is $1 Mil in Santa Barbara so each qualified lead is like gold.

RE: rankings we're doing fairly well. I'm very pleased with MSN results (first page and typically 1 or 2 on all Area + real estate, Area + realtor, and Area + MLS) but results for google and Yahoo have been disappointing. Any recommendation to improve the rankings on these two search engines?

Thanks again. I look forward to your feedback.

Here is my 2 cents,

The dashed lines under links within the text make the words hard to read. I would also think about utilizing a lighter color border. (how about a gradient that has utilizes some of those sunset colors?)

Also your site needs more photo's. People like photo's.

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If you are looking for San Diego Real Estate or you want to view San Diego MLS listings (or at least that portion of the data feed that SANDICOR allows us to display on our websites) go to a local San Diego County real estate Agent's Site.

P.S. We Love Referrals!

Thanks for your feedback. I'll pass it along to my team and get their thoughts.

I really like the site. There is something that just does not feel right and I can not put my finger on it. I think it may be the flash movie.

It takes up a lot of space. You know from stats that most visitors spend a very short amount of time on a site. Ad in this case they are there to find a home. That flash movie is large and moving and keeps drawing my attention and making hard for me to look at other things. Maybe that is just me.

I do like that you have the important buttons on the top and on the left.

You may also want to break up some of the long paragraphs on the bottoms of the pages under the flash. Again people are in a hurry and do not always want to read long paragraphs - just seems overwhelming. - make smaller sections - mix in some 2 column text stuff like that?

Again this is just my $0.02 - I do really like the site.

Scott

Thanks Scott. Great feedback. I agree some of the text blocks are large and we're working on making them smaller and more digestable. Some of it is for content purposes with the engines. We are also looking to incorporate more graphs, charts, and pictures to break the text up. Intresting feedback on the slideshow pictures--we'll take it into consideration. We will be changing it for most of the pages so that the pictures are page specific. Thanks gain for the feedback!