Comments on: Jade Ocean Condos Photo Tour – Designer Ready Condos

By: drew299

drew299 — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 16:06:04 +0000

facinating

By: JL

JL — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 09:18:32 +0000

Lucas,

Maybe you could do something along the lines of what RT suggested. For SEO purposes, Google only cares about the verbiage you are putting on the Homepage and not the pics. For the Homepage, maybe you can keep you topic posts with their complete verbiage, but replace every image with a 1 line text link, which would make the homepage much easier to navigate. That way, a user could click the image links they wanted on the topic post on the homepage or they could click the Topic’s “Comments” link and get the full page with all the images loading along with all the discussion.

By: Renter Tom

Renter Tom — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 22:30:32 +0000

doc t – I have to disagree…the views are just OK, been in buildings with fewer obstructions and that includes some non-new buildings with far superior views. Jade Ocean is a beautiful building, luxurious amenities (although no tennis, basketball, etc.) and nice finishes throughout. However, the floorplans are not the best that I have seen and it is probably because of the shape of the building that causes that. The current unit I am renting has a superior view and far superior floorplan then the two JO’s posted. Just saying…

By: doc t

doc t — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 22:14:58 +0000

Both units you posted in Jade are absolutely phenomenal. The views are as good as I have seen anywhere in South Florida. My only concern is that with all that glass the A/C bills will be very high. Particularly with western exposure. The tinting helps cut down but when you get that western sun watch out.
The size of the units also makes the building very desirable. That is if the units aren’t including the deck area. They should only be giving interior dimensions for sales purposes. It will be interesting to see where the price psf winds up.

By: Renter Tom

Renter Tom — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 21:06:25 +0000

Perhaps you could make the photos small like in the “for sale” pages that you then click on to bring up the large version then click on “next” or “previous” to see each large photo? The photos are great, just with so many all in full size they do make scrolling a bit of an issue. My 2¢.

By: Lucas Lechuga

Lucas Lechuga — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 17:53:59 +0000

JL,

When I first created my blog I used to have links to the titles of each post and a small excerpt. I quickly changed to my present format for SEO purposes. The reality of the matter is that I not only write for humans but also for the search engines. Eliminating the content and pictures from the homepage would be devastating for my traffic. Afterall, 50% of all my traffic comes in from the backdoor through the search engines. I do agree, however, with Drew’s recommendation of adding a forum. I’ve toyed with the idea but haven’t gotten around to it. Maybe after we finish with the iPhone application I’ll add a forum section to the site.

By: BillP

BillP — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 17:10:52 +0000

That square footage includes the terraces , without disclosure, which in my mind calls into question all of the square footage numbers.

When are South Florida developers going to get it??

By: Drew

Drew — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 12:29:19 +0000

I agree.
Lucas, while your focus has been on the various site research tools, you should re-evaluate the overall design of the site. Why not have a forum is a list-style format that encourages users to comment on current and past topics rather than essentially forcing everyone to comment on the current topic due to the visibility issues with previous topics. Doing so will allow for users to stay on a specific thread rather than having each thread’s comments resulting in such varied off-topic responses.

The “homepage” should be one page, with links to the forum list or direct links to current/previous topics. As is, the homepage takes forever to load (esp on a cell phone) since there is so much content on the homepage.

By: JL

JL — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 08:26:15 +0000

Lucas,

When you put up a topic post with a lot of pictures, it effectively kills all topics after it since it’s just too unweildy to navigate to anything beyond it. Also, for some it makes the homepage a PIA to load.

Here’s a suggetion for your site. Why not make your homepage only contain the titles to your topic posts and require a click to load the whole page. That way the homepage would load in a flash and always display your last 10 topics and put a reader an easy click away from any of your recent discussion topics.

Also, using cookies, you could make it so a Topic would display a warning like “new posting” so your users will easily know when any of the recent topics had new discussion. This would encourage continued discussion in older topics.