My original question in developing this project was:  Does a web site offering links to sales training materials help in real estate sales training?  With my target audience consisting of real estate sales agents.

The responses I got led me to conclude that yes this site is helpful in the continuing education of real estate professionals.  I found that several people were planning to keep the site as a resource for their educational uses.  It pulled together information for them to find all in one spot as opposed to needing to explore the different sites themselves.  It streamlined their search activities for courses, books, etc. when they were looking for educational resources.  Of course, they first need to want to further their education - but that is often the case with educational resources.  Even the best design has to be used.

I developed a web site with links to multiple sites for sales training which allows the user to search using the following categories:  books, tapes, seminars, software and/or specific sales trainers.

I presented this site to a group of about 30 real estate sales agents at their weekly office meeting providing them with the opportunity to utilize and evaluate the site with or without my supervision for its usefulness in their professional training and education.  Most agents chose to visit the site on their "own time" as opposed to my supervision.  The facility that I chose to use only provided two computers to be used at a time and people really didn't want to wait around for my help, but  I found that most of the target audience did choose to take the time to visit the site.
 

After using the site the agents will be asked to fill out a short questionnaire via e-mail or paper whichever they prefer.

Filling out the questionnaire thoroughly was a little more difficult than getting my target audience to use the web site.  I mostly got feedback in the form of e-mail without the actual questionnaire being filled out.  The feedback I did receive was extremely consistent and helpful.  In addition, during the preparation of the web site I solicited feedback from some of the more educated professionals I know which was critical to the development of the site.  I found this feedback during the formative process essential to including a diverse selection of information and fulfilling the goal I had set out to accomplish in making the site as educational as possible.
 

Conclusions:

A resource of this type was extremely helpful to not only my target audience, but all real estate professionals as well.  With the information being "on-line" it allowed them to directly move from one resource to another without having to change media (i.e. read a book or flyer, then make a phone call) everything was right on line including registration and purchase of included materials.  I did find a few sites that were similar but not quite as comprehensive as the one that I designed.  These other sites might have included one media vs. several different kinds like I did.  In fact, I used some of these sites as links in my own site (e.g. the seminar schedule site from Real Trends).  I presume that the reason for this is competition.  Some of the trainers made book recommendations, but really wouldn't suggest someone attending someone else's seminar.  The suggestion that I received regarding including links to the National Association of REALTORS (NAR) or the Illinois Association of REALTORS (IAR) was something that I had explored.  I found their upcoming events and information not necessarily the type of information I was attempting to provide.  I was more interested in sales training than legal issues.  There is required continuing education by law and I probably should have included links to this information, but didn't really find any concise resource.  These classes are offered on a local level and I just didn't find anything that really fit my design.  I would probably make more of an effort to include that as a totally separate category called "license renewal" or something like that if I were to expand upon this page.

In the future, I would actually explore expanding on this concept and promoting it to the local board of REALTORS here in Champaign County.  Again, the IAR and NAR don't really have anything like it either, so ideally the concept could be promoted at the local, state, and national levels to promote the education of real estate agents not only in my office, but across the country.  A site like this expands the thinking of what educational materials are applicable to one's profession.  Currently the NAR isn't promoting this type of self-education, but only the structured requirements by each state for maintaining a license.  These continuing education requirements in my experience have little or othing to do with actual sales training but are designed more to keep agents updated on the legal issues and changes in the field.  In my experience any sales training is purely self directed and a resource of this type would be essential to gathering resources for that purpose.  The feedback I received from my target audience confirmed the helpfulness and informative nature of my idea.