Last summer a spent a ton of time developing 2 websites, one for Ancala and the other for Scottsdale Mountain.

Until yesterday, I had a few dozen small, community, real estate websites each targeting one community in Scottsdale or nearby.

The community websites got a decent number of visitors when I first created them 3 years ago but as time when on and Google made changes their ranking algorithm, the number of visitors to the community websites plunged.

A New Design

So I figured I might be able to save the community websites by giving them a complete makeover. I hoped a remodel would do the trick and bring the visitors back.

So I spent a crazy amount of time last summer creating a new, innovative design and applying it to 2 test websites.

If you’ve never built a website, it’s a super creative and fun experience but it’s a super frustrating experience at the same time. Sometimes changing the tiniest little thing in the design, something you expect to take 10 or 20 minutes, can end up taking all day or end up being impossible to do.

In the end, however, I LOVED the design I created and I applied it to the 2 test websites, the community websites for Ancala and Scottsdale Mountain.

And The Results Are In

The key, of course, was whether the new websites would generate more traffic because a beautiful, useful website that gets very few visitors really isn’t useful. If a website falls in the forest and no one reads it, it doesn’t make a sound.

And now more than 6 months later, the numbers are in and the conclusion is clear; the new design did NOT increase the number of visitors. Oh, well. The best laid plans of mice and men.

So, after an appropriate period of mourning, I moved the best parts of those 2 websites here to this website, Arizona Real Estate Notebook, and deleted the old websites.

A New Home for Ancala and Scottsdale Mountain

This website, Arizona Real Estate Notebook, gets a good amount of visitors so I think the new Ancala and Scottsdale Mountain pages will get a lot more readers here than they did when they were part of small, community websites.

Please check out the new pages for Ancala and Scottsdale Mountain and let me know what you think in the comments.

You might notice that I removed the lists of homes for sale (the IDX, in real estate agent lingo) but that’s a story for another post.