This is the third article of
Why and how this blog and its companion web-site Las Vegas homes, condos and commercial real estate came to be. This is a lesson in life, business, planning and execution
In my last blog post I discussed the criteria which my new Las Vegas web site had to satisfy, I’ll repeat it here for your convenience.
1: I had to have full control over the web site so I could change or modify it at will.
2: It had to contain a great deal of information covering all phases of buying or selling a residential property. Commercial real estate is not meant for civilians.
3: People had to be able to find it relatively easily.
4: It had to be aesthetically pleasing; the rule of thumb is that web page readers decide to stay with a web site in under six seconds.
5: The web site had to be easy to navigate and all the information in the web site should be reachable within three clicks if possible.
This is all good. Obviously a dingy little web site is not the answer. The problem was that I had no idea about how to get the job done as I am not an internet technology professional and a complete amateur when it comes to web site design, or programming it’s behavior.
Every one other than my wife and brother advised me against designing the web site myself, Karen and Parviz are believers. My biggest strength and at the same downfall is that I don’t evaluate a problem before I jump in head first and see what happens next. When I make up my mind about attacking a problem, that is that, I don’t listen to others advice. Call it extreme self confidence, arrogance, or intellectual thrill-seeking, I personally call it STUPIDITY. This cost me a sure fire master degree in electrical engineering with a great GPA when I was only a semester away from graduation. On the other hand there in no high like the rush of beating a non-trivial problem (academics way of saying next to impossible to solve).
There is a Chinese proverb that says if you want to put a curse on a person wish him a life in interesting times. Well, I have had an interesting life in interesting times (indeed it is). It is not that bad if it doesn’t kill you.
Anyhow, it took me two minutes to write these criteria and more than 3,800 hours (and counting at the rate 90+ hours/week) of work to try to satisfy them. This is problem solving at its best. Following is an analysis of how I tried to satisfy each criterion.
1: I had to have full control over the web site so I could build to my taste and change it at will.
The only solution to this problem is that I had to be the web master and build the web site myself, from scratch. If I am the designer, I have full control over the web site, know how everything works and can make any changes to the site easily and quickly.
Furthermore the fact of life is that most real estate agents know very little about designing web sites and conversely most web site designers and IT professionals know very little about real estate. This is my opportunity to leverage and use my problem solving skills and years of education (my assets) to surpass my competitors.
2: It (the web site) had to contain a great deal of information covering all phases of buying or selling a residential property. Commercial real estate is not meant for civilians.
Actually this is the easiest part, I subscribed to Real Estate ABC, This is a web site that any real estate agent can subscribe to and show their pages in her/his web site. They have made a great deal of money writing expert articles about buying and selling real estate, mortgage and credit advice and a Glossary of real estate and mortgage terms. This glossary deciphers real estate, mortgage and credit terms for prospective real estate buyers and sellers.
I also purchased the license for financial and mortgage calculators which the visitors to my web site can use to calculate simple interest on a loan, Annual percentage rate (APR), home sellers proceeds, refinancing your residence, discounted cash flow and future values, etc.
And a great deal more information you can check for yourself in the side bars of my web site.
I have also provided the visitors to my site with 4 different Las Vegas Home and condominiums market statistics in addition to Las Vegas, Nevada economic news, commercial real estate news and home and condos news articles which I update about three times a month. Enough of this, visit the web site and see for yourself. One last point, what you see now is only the skeleton for the site and much more will added over time.
3: People had to be able to find my web site relatively easily.
This is the big one.
Considering that there are over 21.7 million sites that contain all the words in Las Vegas real estate in a Google search. This number drops to 2.67 million if you put “Las Vegas real estate” in quotes, which means you are searching for exact match, 2.67 million is still nothing to sneeze at.
Other statics follows. These results are obtained from searching for all the words and an exact match in the Google search results.
Las Vegas Nevada real estate = 7,820,000
“Las Vegas Nevada real estate” = 106,000
Las Vegas commercial real estate =2,830,000
“Las Vegas commercial real estate” = 27,500
Las Vegas Homes = 23,100,000
“Las Vegas Homes” = 350,000
Las Vegas Condos = 18,300,000
“Las Vegas condos” = 236,000
Las Vegas Land = 5,350,000
“Las Vegas Land” = 38,800
Most searches are not conducted using just these words, and the searchers desire additional information, for example someone looking to buy Las Vegas New homes will add another term or two to their search phrase like (Las Vegas new homes for sale, Las Vegas new homes listings), etc. A great web site has to do well in many keyword combinations. This is a non-trivial problem which attracts me like a moth to a bright light. The down-side is if the moth gets too close to the light, it gets burnt.
Another point is that if one designs the greatest web site ever and it ranks number 50,000 in search engine results, no one can find it and it is not worth the pixels on the computer screen. The way people operate is that they may go 10-30 results deep in search results, if what they look for is not provided in previous links. If the number one ranked site in the search engine results provides the searcher with exactly what he/she is looking for, the 20th ranked site is totally out of luck; let alone number 200, or 5,000.
A wealthy and successful Roman’s businessman’s son at the time of Aristotle (384-322 B.C. Greek philosopher) wanted to compliment his father by telling him that he admired his father so much that he wanted to be just like him when he grows up. Rather than smiling and thanking his son, the father became upset and started to walk away. His son asked him as to the reason for his reaction, and the father replied that I wanted to be like Aristotle and ended up like this, I worry about the standard you are shooting for. One might as well shoot for the moon and see where she/he ends up.
Keeping this in mind my goal was to design a web-site which within 18 month after the final installation (America’s birthday July 4th, 2007) will dominate and reign supreme over all competition web sites in all of my desired keyword combinations for years to come. Regardless of the nature of the completion, be it a national web site like Cityfeet or local (No kidding here).
Well my web site’s skeleton is done and to my amazement it is about six month ahead of my best estimates and well under way to accomplish the mission.
I will try to finish this discussion in the next two blogs. In the next blog I will explain the design process from my site.
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