Lani – I think you guys have come up with a great mix. It is that thinking they are in the wrong place aspect that I was thinking about when I decided to go the static front page route. The blogs are the meat, but I wanted it to have a traditional package.

Kelley – Yes Currently it is straight…but my hair is my favorite thing to mess with – color, cut style – so there is never any telling Not great for my branding, but it keeps me sane (sort of)!

I think your consideration of identifying your key market is an important one. You are right that you can’t control all situations. Maybe that is a vote for the traditional front site with an attached blog. Maybe it just means we should do business the way we are comfortable and move along.

You really hit the nail on the head with the who, how, what and action.

There are so many categories of audiences that we can consider. There’s your daily reader, your direct referral, your search engine hit, your paid adwords, etcetera. There’s a whole market built around optimizing landing pages for each type of audience. Obviously, you can’t control every interaction, but you really have to think about WHO is visiting and HOW, and combine that with WHAT they want to see, what you need to present, in order for them to take the ACTION you want them to take: subscribe, come back and read again, whatever it is.

It’s going to be different for someone looking for first time buyer info. Allow me to generalize and say that person is younger. They may know what a blog is so maybe we can show them stuff in a traditional blog format. But someone looking for luxury information is probably a baby boomer and may not know a blog from tuesday.

That exact question you ask is why everyone needs to think about their audience and how all those kinds of different people are going to interact and travel to and through the site. Having good landing pages should reduce bounce rates and increase not only visit length, but retention rates. If you’re already providing fabulous information, then the question becomes how to present it better, to the right people, at the right time.

Some people won’t get a tubular blog platform and think they’ve stumbled into the wrong place. Others get it and don’t care, just want to search the MLS or get your phone number to call you.