Hightower Realty helps people buy and sell residential and vacation homes in the Orlando, Florida area.

Licensed as a real estate brokerage, it's owned and operated by Realtor® and broker Denis Le Marchant-Smith. It's not affiliated with any other national or real estate franchise. Hightower Realty has been in business since 1995.

Denis Le Marchant-Smith is a member of the National Association of Realtors, the Florida Association of Realtors, and the Osceola County Association of Realtors.

Visit Hightower Realty's website here:
http://www.hightower-realty.com

Website Review

Positives:

• The first place my eye went to when I visited the site was the sales copy in the middle of the page. This happened because the homepage is filled with colors and photos all around the sides of the page, while the middle of the page contained black & white text. This contrast is what draws the human eye. You can do it with the reverse, but putting black & white text all over the page, and a colorful photo in the middle.



• The homepage, as well as the entire website, has lots of text content, great! Search engines will love it.

Negatives

The page width is too large - The HTML coding uses a table with a fixed width of 1040 pixels. Most web statistics today shows that 20% of monitor resolutions are still set at 800 pixels wide, and about 50% are set at 1024 pixels wide. So right there, 70% of the site visitors are having to scroll horizontally to see the full page. Either use a proportional table width measured in "%", or avoid table widths greater than 770 pixels.


• The homepage is too busy with information - When people are presented with so many choices on where to click, more often than not, they don't click anything. Start by figuring out the top 5 things your clients hope to find (e.g. photo of agent, background, credentials, track record, area of specialty, etc.) and put it all on the homepage. Add navigational links to other pages, but either use them sparingly, or position them so they don't compete with your key elements. People like to be led, and they like it simple!



• Low keyword density - The word "real estate" needs to appear on the homepage numerous times, at a minimum of 5 times, preferably 10. I spotted only three occurences. Also keyword density for Denis' region is low as well, such as "florida real estate" and "orlando real estate". Increasing these occurences will help with search engine optimization.



• Links are not underlined - Links need to be underlined to help people understand that they're links. You'll be surprised to learn how many people don't know that the bolded text on Hightower Realty's website are actually links. This may not be an issue with websites geared to a web-savvy audience, however, real estate websites are supposed to be written to everybody. Put your key information on the homepage (contact info, background, etc.) to minimize the need to click.

Note: The above is a paid review that Hightower Realty asked us to conduct.

Labels: Website Review