As simple as the title is, “target this market now” is possibly the best advice I can give to web designers. I have looked at a lot of real estate sites in Florida and know they are poorly designed.  I am virtually certain that the problem is not limited to my home territory.  You could do real estate agents, their customers, and yourself a favor by improving those sites.

Why am I looking at real estate sites?  Because I need to relocate again.  So I’ve looked at hundreds of listings on different agencies’ sites.  I have learned first-hand how these sites fail their customers.  When I come across a house I like, within my budget, I’ll go to the selling agencies’ site to look up more information.  Too many times, I have found the site difficult to use and discouraging.  Mind you, I am speaking here as a customer, one who is looking for a specific unit to buy or rent and I need good, clear information that is easy to find.

Let me address this complaint to real estate agents, looking to make their sites more “customer friendly.”   Here are the top reasons I haven’t contacted you about the house you’re selling, for commission (if you forgot).

1. The site is purely Flash – This is not always a deal ender. However, leaving my feelings for Flash aside, some of you make it damn near impossible to share the information with others.  There are a lot of these Flash based sites that are built in a manner that stops your audience from sharing important information with others.   A house is a big purchase, usually involving more than one person.   This isn’t a music video; kill the Flash.
2. You have music playing in the background – This is always a “no.”  It’s not entertaining and almost always causes a distraction.  Furthermore, if you’re playing the melody to “Mad World,” it really gives a negative vibe to doing business with you.  Again, this isn’t a music video; kill the band.
3. You don’t make crucial information accessible – Your time is valuable, and so is your customers’.  Presenting information as clearly as possible is crucial. If I am interested, but  confused, I have to (attempt to) call you and get that information before continuing.  Worse yet, I may simply move on to another house on another website where the information is readily available.
4. Wrong Contact information – It’s a good idea to look into a site redesign if your contact information is out of date.
5. Poor use of social media – I respect the effort to use social media.  Used wisely, it can be very effective.  But tread carefully and work with Web designers who know this world.  I could go on for hours about this, from constant tweets about “amazing opportunities” to video walk through with obnoxious music in the background.   You can, and should, research on how to use social media more effectively.

*BONUS ADVICE* Your pictures contradict your written information – If I see one more listing with pictures of the WRONG house, I will get a migraine.  You know who you are, and I hope you are working to remedy the problem..

I’m not saying that redesigning your online presence will create a flood of new business, especially in this economy.  But discouraging visitors to your site is not helping. If you’re a real estate agent, please look around for a quality web designer who understands what you really need and can provide it.  If you’re a web designer, do some searches and reach out to these agencies.   You, the agency, and their customers will all benefit.

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Update (7/20/10):

Woothemes recently added a real estate centric theme to their growing portfolio of Premium themes.  Estate comes as a huge relief to someone, like myself, who’s sick of looking at poorly designed real estate sites.  Even at a premium price ($200), the theme blows away any real estate website I’ve seen to date (and I’m still in the process of buying a house) and is well worth the investment.  If you sell houses, I beg you to consider using WordPress with this theme on your site.

Now that the iPad dust is settling, it’s clear that Apple’s hot new tablet is only the first of many from multiple vendors.  The iPad is unique—for now—but it’s just the start of the next generation of mobile computing.

That’s a wonderful opportunity for web designers and content providers, but it is also a significant challenge.  It gives us the opportunity to reach more readers, more of the time.  But it also poses a significant challenge since we need to design sites that work well with tablets, other mobile devices, and standard desktops and laptops.  Who wants to develop the same site three times for three different kinds of devices?

Here Come the Tablets -

Companies from HTC to Notion INK are releasing tablet computers with only touch screen interfaces. Without a keyboard and mouse, attributes like “hover” are null.  So, too, are languages that might not be supported across multiple platforms

These are big changes, and they pose serious challenges for developers and designers.   I’m certain most of us don’t want to develop the same site 3 times (web, mobile, and tablet).

How am I coping with this challenge on my next website?

Layout -

960 Grid System. I’ve always been a fan, but I have strayed because of increased traffic from widescreen monitors. Going back to 960px will give me a website that fits perfectly with landscape mode on most tablets. As tempting as a horizontally scrolling website is, I still find that kind of scrolling isn’t easy on a normal browser.

The tablet’s screen feels tighter, a lot tighter.  When using an iPad to look at content on a blog where I am the web manager, I noticed that the content is very tight against the browser’s edge.  Yet it looks fine on my netbook, with similar resolution.

Text -

Colors with strong contrast are crucial because tablets are aimed at casual, on-the-go computing. Easy accessibility is a big reason people like tablets, and they won’t plunk them down in a fixed position.  That means the devices will be used under a wide variety of lighting conditions.   We have to respond with text that’s easy to read, whether the tablets are outside in direct sunlight, in an office with strong fluorescents, or in a bedroom with dim table lamps.

Links and Navigation -

With the iPad’s touch screen sensitivity, links and navigation aren’t big issues.  But that’s only for the iPad.  Links and navigation probably will be issues for other new tablets. Until other device manufacturers (Cough “HTC”) get up to par, targets need to be larger.  The simplest way is to use padding, which I’m sure most do already.

I noticed, while using the iPad, that I had no interest in hyperlinks. In contrast, I’m always clicking through to supportive articles on blogs.  While hyperlinks are still important for browsing on computers, I’m thinking about writing a plug-in for WordPress that adds links under the articles to increase accessibility across platforms..

While the hover attribute is still key for regular computing, it can’t be used to its full extent on the iPad.  The same could well be true on other tablets coming out soon.   This limitation on hovering could also cause issues with some JavaScript functions and CSS uses, like drop down menus. Thankfully, there is a small upside.  It discourages those atrocious in-text advertisements (read: DONT USE THEM. Ever.) .

Advertisement -

Keep it tasteful.  By tasteful, I mean do your best to keep readers focused on your content.  That’s the heart of the matter.  Placing advertisements as roadblocks already angers most users, and it will be even more distracting to casual readers using tablets.  Even on a desktop, where we have a lot of extra real-estate, the screen can seem cramped with a 960 Grid.

Bottom Line: Options for Developers and Content Providers -

One obvious strategy is to build a website specifically for the iPad. Although that’s certainly a simple, straightforward way to go, it carries a big downside.  As more tablets come out, they won’t use Apple standards so you won’t necessarily be able to reach them.  A lot of specifications are bound to change cross platforms.  For now, then, it’s probably best to generalize for your audience.

The good news, I am happy to report, is that a lot of tablet manufacturers will stay ahead of the game by embracing new standards like HTML5 and CSS3.  Those standards should make life a little easier as we design for a new generation of tablet computers.   Those tablets are going to be widely adopted—they are a major step toward ubiquitous computing–and that’s an exciting (if daunting) prospect for those of us who design and develop.

From Woopra to Google Analytics, and everything in between, there’s a lot out there for website traffic analysis. Because of the nature of a new project I’m working on, I was looking for a script I could host myself locally and have some flexibility with. Within a couple seconds of Google searching, I came across Piwik which pretty much solves my needs. Although I’ve only loaded it on my test server, I’ve set it up to track multiple websites to get a better feel.

So far, Piwik seems to be pretty thorough. Not to the point of hosted services, but it’s still in beta (0.5.4) and is really fast. Not only does it work well, it’s carries a minimalistic design which is easy to navigate and allows the user to jump right in. Since it is self hosted, the software suggests a minimum of 128mb RAM allowance to operate for “medium to high traffic websites.” While I have it installed on a dedicated server, I think it could work on most shared hosted environments (if your website can run on a shared host).

The software allows you to configure multiple sites, as I mentioned before. This means that you can use one instance to manage traffic from multiple sources, without having to rely on third party solutions.

Finally, the software is free and open source. Not only is the price right, however because it is open source, there is a lot of potential for the script to grow from out side development.

Oh, and it installed in less then 5 minutes.

Quoting Thoreau on this blog might be a bit odd, yet the quote sums up my feeling for the plugin. When I read about Tweetable on Mashable, I thought sarcastically “hurray, another Twitter plugin.” After setting it up, being swayed by their referral, I really enjoyed it’s presence. The plugin places a quick Twitter interface in the admin panel, allowing the admin (or authors) to interact on the blogs Twitter account.

“Simplify, simplify.” – Henry David Thoreau. A quote stuck in my head after starting to read On Writing Well, by William Zinsser.

To me, it comes as a blessing. As I have been trying to force myself to concentrate on my blog, I’m excited that I now have access to Twitter without the need of another tab or application.

Along with the embedded Twitter application, the plugin publishes my posts to Twitter and places a TweetMEME icon on my posts. Two tasks which had been handled through other plugins.

While not a selling point, the posts are tagged with the application you name during setup. Which is why in the image above you see “from Michael Lipson,” named after my blog.  Just a little extra personality for the 140 character social network.

Ok, not really for my personal sites, however I do find that checking Google Analytics and server based scripts to be a little difficult to comprehend/believe.  With most statistic tracking systems I’ve used in the past, the majority of them have been “too much” for smaller sites.  This was the case until I stumbled across Woopra, several months ago while it was still an invite-only beta.  I applied for an invite and was accepted within a week, so I was introduced to the desktop application and comprehendible statistics.

Ok, I’m really not a newb.  I have years of experience with Google Analytics, working with sites which generate enough traffic to justify all the information provided by GA, but for my personal sites it just isn’t the case.  If you’re brave enough to look at the other sites shown in Woopra, you’ll notice they are all in development and for the most part barren (except my blog!).

Woopra, to me, is the perfect starting point for tracking any website as it’s in development and getting started.  It provides accurate information instantly to your desktop and even gives you the power to interact with your audience. While some might see this as a novelty, I see it as a great tool to react relatively quickly knowing your audiences habits.  For me, I’ve seen significant traffic coming from my Android related posts specifically “Android Screenshot applications,” which means that it’s an area I’ll want to focus on.  Over the next couple weeks if this articles doing well, I’ll write more on development and design.

While it could be just as beneficial with larger sites, the highlight comes with personal sites where the owner has the ability to pivot quickly.  I’d also imagine that as a site starts gaining a lot of traffic, the immediate information would become overwhelming. However, like any other analytic tool, Woopra provides a plethora of information beyond the immediate resources.  For free users, the history is limited to 3 months, however with the premium service (required for bigger sites) the history can be extended up to 3 years.

Beyond the awesomeness of the immediate information, Woopra really shines with its organization for the individual user. If you aren’t preparing reports for clients and just want to know the facts, everything is there in plain sight and easy to understand.

Unfortunately, all the sites I have in the screenshots are sites in development/preproduction. I’ll try to get some screenshots of soon of more populated sites.

After much searching and several headaches, I’ve finally installed a new comment system on my blog. Instead of requiring information, name, email and such, the system allows for users to securely use their Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo and OpenID accounts to comment on my blog. Aside from removing the need to moderate comments, the system should allow better discussion then the built-in WordPress solution.

Right now, as far as it has been tested, there’s a couple issues using Facebook connect. If anyone would be gracious enough to comment using Yahoo or Twitter, I’d appreciate the help.

HTML is so 200x. In my wild mind, I see what Adobe AIR and Google’s Chrome-OS are bringing to the table as a prediction of things to come. While the two might seem vastly different, they shine light on what I believe will be the future of our “on-line” experience.

Adobe AIR, is a recent tool by Adobe which introduces cross platform development giving developers a universal market. While not all of the applications available are portals to web applications, the majority of them interface with on-line counterparts. When people think AIR, they are usually thinking about their favorite Twitter desktop client, however the potential goes far beyond just that as the platform will grow to provide what I think will be a corner stone to the future of development. Taking it a step further, Google developed their Chrome OS as a portal to their services for people on the go, specifically net book owners.

Chrome-OS, while an actual operating system, provides the same on line ideology of AIR (if not more). Chrome OS is a hybrid of hardware based technologies and cloud reliance. With Chrome-OS the idea is that the user will have a lightweight, almost instantly accessible operating system which connects applications (provided by Google and third party developers). Relying on Java, rather then operating on web based programming languages like PHP and Javascript. These applications, the life of your user experience, will require almost no overhead and will be ready to go within seconds of powering on your machine.

To me both of these products are huge. Thanks to AIR, I’ve been able to utilize a lot of the same applications I use on my desktop on my new Netbook running Ubuntu Netbook Remix. Meaning, that with almost no effort, I am able to maintain the same level of productivity without having to adjust to new interfaces. Looking forward to Chrome-OS, the ability to interface with my Google Accounts is a huge step forward because I already use Google’s on line solutions for email, documents, contact management and even Google Voice as my primary number.

On the back burner, a bit less hyped, is Microsoft’s new solution which is looking to provide a cloud based solution for application hosting. While I’ve broken free of Microsoft’s grips, in terms of M$ Office, I still am considering this a step in the right direction for those backing ASP languages. I’m still a bit new to the pricing structure, which seems on par with other cloud solutions, however backing from such an industry leader is a good sign. Conveniently they saw it fit to make the announcement the same day Google announced Chrome-OS.

While I’ve become a big supporter of cloud based solutions in recent months, I have to say that beyond the convenience of being “portable,” cloud solutions still worry a lot of people. The first question I hear is always, without fail, “security” followed with the question of reliability. My response to both of these is “I’m sure the tech who set up the servers hosting your information know more about the issue than you or I.” In the cases of Chrome-OS and Adobe AIR, you’re trusting little extra with the corporations then you are currently using their products and services. Ideally, you’d be sharing less because you are interacting directly with the server and not a document based interface.