My new website up - HELP! - Need review for improvement + suggestions from property owners.

[housingrental]

Please check out my new website at www.hoffaco.com

Please let me know your thoughts on it.



All suggestions for improvement, positive, and negative comments are welcome!



As a rental property owner if you were looking for property management in Kitchener and Waterloo what would you like to see on the website?



Anyone familiar with website design -I appreciate insights into the site as it relates to being user friendly, converting leads to customer, and increasing traffic.



I posted a similar post a few years ago on my prior site and made a lot of the changes based on this forums feedback.

I will do the same from your posts.



Thank you in advance - I appreciate your help!

 

[Alvaro Sanchez]

As renter:



- Ability to sort by price or filter by bedrooms, baths, etc. (Make it easier to find or filter).

- Pictures too small and limited.

- Too much text per property, I would use more pictures than text.



As property owner:

- I would be looking as how you market the units and present my properties. Perhaps, having a site exclusively tailor for renters.



my 2 cents...

 

[housingrental]

Thank you Alvaro, it is appreciated!

Anyone else?

 

[jonathanb]

Good day Adam,



I think the new site looks great! A nice clean look.



Plotting the properties on a map as a search feature would be handy to a renter.



Jon

 

[ChrisDavies]

The left nav bar takes up too much space. You could go smaller font with fewer words, but I'd really recommend a top nav bar instead. The top link just takes you home, so it should say something that indicates that. The other links can be more succinct.



On pages like http://www.hoffaco.com/waterloo-property-management your call to action (click here for a free quote) needs to be in a different colour and underlined. I'd suggest changing the colour of your header font away from blue to make the links a different colour. People love buttons, which you could put after each section, but consider a box on the right with 'next steps' and series of options. I was looking at Laralyn's website and quite liked it, including the downloadable articles which are great lead generators.



Your homes for rent page has a poor URL (http://www.hoffaco.com/apartment). At the least it should say /homes-for-rent-kitchener-waterloo. And if they're different enough to justify two parts to your page you should have two pages, homes-in-waterloo and homes-in-kitchener. Both pages can benefit from some text at the top or bottom about the area and local housing info - search engines love text. I love the text on the pages and including the postal code is a great idea because it helps your ads play nice with search engines.



Pages like your blog http://www.hoffaco.com/blog - the blue title text shoudl be clickable as well. This is for usabilitiy (it's blue, I tried to click it) and because the text influences how search engines see the next page and what they think it's about...'Read More' isn't it



I'd recommend testing the 'check availability' button. I'm not convinced that the yellow and that text will attract attention.



You're rocking Google Analytics, good stuff! Make sure you get conversion tracking set up and if you're using paid search traffic this is key. I use tracking on buttons like 'check availability', when people download things, spend more than 10 minutes or 20 pages on your site



Phew. That's it.

 

[Undivided]

Hi Adam,



I think the site could really use those cat pictures put back up.

Id really like to see a pic of the day, mostly just different pics of mr. Fluffers.



=^.^=



Thanks!

Sam

 

[housingrental]

Jon - Thank you, this is something I might implement soon.



Chris - WOW - Awesome. Once there's more posts on this topic I'm going to go through each and edit the site. Your post I'll go through line by line and take action from it. Thank you for your time on this!!!

 

[Undivided]

Hi Adam,



I think the site could really use those cat pictures put back up.

Id really like to see a pic of the day, mostly just different pics of mr. Fluffers.



=^.^=



Thanks!

Sam

 

[housingrental]

Sam - I had a lot of cat pictures, videos, and videos of animals from renters. I was told "it's not professionally" "the videos of renters are creepy" (renters sent them in) etc. I've dropped them for now to eliminate property owners concerns. Once I get up to 200 locations they are going back on!

 

[housingrental]

TTT

Any other feedback is appreciated

 

[housingrental]

I have made changes to Hoffaco Property Management website at www.hoffaco.com

I appreciate all feedback to improve it further

 

[moki]

The site seems pretty bare bones. I think theres also something wrong when I try to view it in Firefox. I looked at homes for rent, and some appeared, but then quickly disappeared.