We looked at a website that focuses on term life insurance.   The site is located at http://www.wholesaleinsurance.net.

The things that we like

1. We like that the site has valid XHTML and uses Cascading Style Sheets to separate the content from the presentation.
2. The website has a lot of keyword links relevant to the information on the site.
3. We also like that the main content is presented in short paragraphs and that you don’t have to read back and forth across the entire page. Only the relevant information is contained in each page and the navigation is consistent.
4. On the whole, the site is laid out nicely.

The things that we don’t like

1. We don’t like that the colors may be a problem for some individuals with visual deficiencies. They may have trouble differentiating between the colors especially in the navigation.
2. We don’t like the fact that the site uses pixels for text size rather than em&’s or percentages. The text does size larger in Firefox, but not in Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer is the predominant browser for less advanced internet users since it comes preloaded in most computer packages, so I would advise to be sure it resizes in both Internet Explorer and Firefox.
3. This site could possibly benefit from more keywords in the head of the document, although there are several in the navigation.
4. This site also lacks the “Skip to Content” links for text readers. Users that use text readers, will have to go through the long list of navigation links before they can get to the content on each page and may likely go to another site.

Later this week I will be traveling to Ontario, California for the 2007 Podcast and New Media Expo.  It used to be called the Podcast and Portable Media Expo btw.

I’m running a new computer and it doesn’t have all of my podcasting gear on it.  I am not going to schlep 2 machines across the country (my buddy used to be into model rocket shows and stuff and would literally have to rent a uhaul to go to the different shows and competitions, so I can’t complain too much), so I am rapidly trying to get my new machine loaded up.  So that means, I am downloading and installing a lot of programs

• iTunes
• Audacity
• All the Audacity plugins (3-4 more programs and their sub parts and libraries)
• My iTune subscriptions of podcast shows so that I can connect faces to voices
• itineraries,
• bookmarks of the sites and shows of the new attendees that are popping up in the forums
• and some of the products and software of the exhibiting companies so that I can hopefully ask intelligent and insightful questions about their latest releases (and find out if they are really worth it this go around.

So I am sure that my computer will almost certainly run like crap by the end of the week, after all it is a PC. .  .

We are going to kick off a new segment on top 10 Tech Web Tip’s. It’s a new category were we will review websites and identified the three things that we like about the website and its design and the three things that we think could use improvement.

We will support some of our findings with their own assessments or reasons for why we like or dislike things as well as why we think certain things will work on the web and some won’t. A major component of learning how to run a better website is understanding what works and what doesn’t and to do that you have to review and look at hundreds if not thousands of websites.

Tonight we’ll kick it off by looking at a website that focuses on Las Vegas luxury homes. The website is located at www.lasvegasluxuryproperties.com.

The three things that we like

1. For search engine ranking purposes we like the fact that this website has lots of actual hyperlinks as opposed to flash buttons in its sidebar
2. We also like the rotating pictures that display luxury Las Vegas properties
3. We like the color scheme for the site in general

The three things that we don’t like

1. I like the fact that the website provides both an e-mail address and a phone number, but I think those phone numbers and the e-mail address should be moved into its own section somewhere lower on the page area is real estate website is detracting from the valuable webpage real estate by putting a phone number and e-mail address at the top
2. this website has 20 errors and its validation, for website of this nature that’s attempting to attract attention through natural Google search this is a basic mistake that needs to be corrected. It’s not that difficult to validate a site especially when you only have 20 errors.
3. The keyword density for this particular website is not bad, but is not especially good either. Each page covers too many keywords in that reduces the overall all density. They should focus more on individual keywords on individual pages that should help their overall results.