Green Taxi

Having acquired REITs.com earlier this year, we finally decided to do something with it.  Initially we had it parked as we gave priority to other projects.  However, as these projects have been outsourced, or at least found a steady rythym in their progress, we’ve readdressed the issue of what to do with several top domains that Neptune Ventures owns.

I am very disappointed that we had to park this site.  I will be the first to admit that I underestimated the downside of leaving a site parked.  However, once we acquired Basketball.org and began to develop that, we realized firsthand the downside to leaving a site parked for such a long period of time.  Basketball.org still struggles to clear its domain name, although we are making progress.  The most recent frustration I have is that Alexa still lists the site under its previously parked title, even though we have had an active blog on there since early May of this year.

Fortunately, REITs.com was previously forwarded to another site owned by the previous owner, and therefore we had it parked for less than a year.  I do hope we rescued it before it received even further negative SEO points.

Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs), are publicly listed stocks that act as funds whose charter is to hold or invest in properties, manage rentals for the properties, and pass through dividends to its stockholders.  I realize that this is not necessarily a great time for the stock market, and in particular, real estate.  However, I do agree with others that tough economic times will continue to drive more people online to find the cheapest deals, rates, and advertising.  The same will come in the financial sector.  People will continue to use REITs as a financial tool, however it may be as a hedge on their mortgage instead of as an active investment.

The development of the site was done entirely in WordPress.  I think WordPress is a great tool for anyone building a web site.  Unless you have complex software required or a big e-commerce site, WordPress is a solid solution to home or cheap third-party development.  Having seen what The Big Picturehas done in WordPress, and the amount of plug-in’s continuously created, I have no doubt that we will continue to use this for any smaller site we build out.

The logo we created quite quickly on our own.  I would like to improve that soon.  We have since found a site, 99designs.com, suggested by Elliot, where designers compete to create your logo.  It works great and we ended up with our final Lahaina.com logo (not yet in use) from there.

The content has either been written by myself (the few news articles) or from a Romanian writer I found on Elance.  I am disappointed by the content and will not use a cheap foreign writer for such a complex topic in the future.

However, besides the static content, we also have Google News feeds coming through in an RSS WordPress plug-in.  These are the best stories out there and I could not create them better myself.  While this may drive people away from our site for now, I think the fresh content is much more important for the longer term plans of the site.

With the content, I used Google Adwords Keyword Tool and the SEObook results to find popular terms that I could potential gain SEO points in.  Realizing that many people search for specific countries and introductory information, I focused on creating a page for main REITs countries, as well as creating an introductory page, “the benifits of” page, and a glossary.  The next step in the written content creation is to create pages for the types of REITs (mortgage, apartment, private, etc.), as these are also long-tail terms.

Outside of this, we have tried using a map widget and we are also embedding REIT stock quotes.  I am really pushing to use as many plug-ins and widgets as possible with this site to expand my understanding of what can possibly be done in WordPress.  Look for more to come as I have just downloaded another 5-6 plug-ins over the weekend that I have yet to put into use.  One of them is a video plug-in, but I am still experimenting with that one a bit.

I would appreciate feedback on the site.  Negative feedback is fine.  From here on it is only helpful feedback. 

All in all, I have enjoyed the experience and am really only disappointed in some of the written content and parts of the design that are weak or were rushed.  Fortunately, those can be improved over time.  October already brought in double our average monthly parking revenue on the site and that was with it only partially working while being developed.  We are also already seeing SEO results, as it has moved up to the third spot in Yahoo within just a month of being a parked site. 

Lastly, if you are interested in advertising on the site, please contact us for more information.

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