If you live in the state of Florida, and are having troubles getting financing for your dream home, you may want to check out the Florida Mortgage Blogger. Here you will find the blog written by Kevin, a Mortgage Professional in Florida who has as his life mission to ‘help good people achieve their Florida Home Loan goals’. Kevin’s blog is all about serving the people of Florida, and you can get a good feel for this through his header which states he is ‘building better relationships one step at a time’. Kevin’s work is focused on the Winter Haven, Florida area, and he works both with clients and real estate agents as you will see on his blog. He has been in the mortgage industry for two years now, and works to assist clients in obtaining financing that meets their unique requirements. He does so by primarily working with FHA and VA loan programs to offer more flexible and affordable options in mortgage loans. You can see this for yourself through any of Kevin’s most recent bloggeries: Weekly Winter Haven Mortgage Rate Report: February 9, 2009; Home Buyers Are on the Move as Rates Stay Low and Pending Sales Rise; Would You Buy a Home for $15,000?; FL Mortgage Rates Finally Hit Bottom?; and Winter Haven Sees Lower Mortgage Rates After Geithner’s Speech.
This blog is set up more like a business website than a blog, and thus is missing some blog meat that is making the blog a little cumbersome to navigate. Bloggeries are centralized with both left and right sided navigation bars with a lot of information on Florida Home Loans. In the top navigation bar you can find standard links to the About Page and Home page. The left navigation bar will give you subscription information as well as a Recent Comments Menu and Yahoo widget showing you how many Yahoo links the blog has. In the right sided navigation bar, you will find Contact Information, and a form you can fill out to get onto Kevin’s mailing list, as well as a Pages Menu. In the Pages Menu you will find links to the About Page, Interviews and Podcasts, Orlando, Florida area, Testimonials, and a link to subscribe by Email. Bloggeries are primarily textual with a few pictures and charts within the bloggeries, so you get a strong business sense from the blog’s presentation.
This blog gets a 3.4/5 at the time of review, and needs a few tweaks to look more like a blog and less like a business page. Activity is up to date, so this blog scores well on how it feeds the search engines and meets the needs of its readers. Is the blog for loan clients or for real estate agents? For realtors, terms and language used on this blog would be useful, but the average home owner to-be is not familiar with terms such as ‘Absorption Rates’ and the like. Sales reports mean little to the home owner, but would be useful for the real estate agent. Content needs to be ‘dumbed down’ for the average Internet reader perhaps. Some relevant pictures, perhaps of homes for sale in the area, would speak to prospective home owners and add some meaning to the bloggeries for them. And regardless of who the blog is targeted to, essential blog items such as a Categories Menu and Recent Posts Menu would make this blog much easier to navigate and look more like an information resource on the topic. This blog is off to a great start as far as reaching the real estate market, but needs some tweaks in terms of user friendliness if it is trying to reach as many potential prospects as possible.
-Chrissie
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