angrynorth

I've been working on this for a bit now and I would appreciate a bit of feedback.

If anyone has any comments on the site I would really appreciate it. Just the general look, tone and functionality would be really welcome, I hope to launch the site next Monday so it would be a great help to get some real world impressions.

The properties that are for sale on there are for real BTW so if you do use the add feedback feature make sure its a real opinion.

Stuff I know doesn't work yet
Email confirmation when registering
Width of results and full details column in Firefox
Booking Viewings asks for an offer price which it shouldn't
Minor cosmetic things.


PS I will return the favour too for anyone who wants to use the site to help sell their own property, I need to fill it with as many as possible at the moment so I'll list for free to any scoobydudes wanting to put theirs on.

Thanks

paulr

1.I'd reword the headline a bit,eg
Home/Search/Sell/My Profile/Site Features/Contact

2.Welcome pararaph.first impression,a bit slushy.

3.The rest of it,too many words to be honest.

4.Welcome to homeinfo....and what do you do.You need somewhere in the heading that says "estate agent" or "we sell houses".

Visiting a site you want to be straight into a search or straight to the house you are selling.Apart from that what else is there.There's too much waffle.If i was selling a house and had a choice of sites i'd think twice about using yours.
Cut out some of the words and get straight to the point.

Design and colour not bad i guess,but it looks like a website for a pharmacy.A bit pale.

Heres one of the most succesful sites in the UK.I just browse when i want ideas,or to look how the other half live!!!!.

http://www.foxtons.co.uk/

DomoKun

There are never too may words if they are truthful sir.

dexter

Good looking site, but I would have preferred it to be the full width of the page.

My only negative is that all the "love" stuff is a bit camp, and comes on a bit strong.

Other than that, pretty good.

Just my tuppeny`s worth.

Lum

Looks right in Firefox which is good. I wont be able to test it in my usual browser (Konqueror) until Friday as I only have the work laptop with me.

I don't like the fixed-width nature of it though. I have to do a lot of horizontal scrolling to read the text and frankly couldn't be arsed.

Buckrogers

Overall looks good.

Main text font, for me, looks funny though, hard to read, kind of squashed together letters. Go for a more standard font.

Buck

paulr

Truth comes from actions not words.

angrynorth

To be honest, I think the navigation benefits from being more descriptive. Your suggestion to remove the word "Homes" from "Search Homes" just seems a little odd.

Fair point, I have been thinking of rewording it, its very difficult to express the approach that the company has without being slushy though.

Catch 22, we need people to know the services offered and the difference between us and your average agent, which we can't really do with out words. Until we are at a point in the market where this is understood, I think we will have to keep them

Working on this right now, thanks.

Is the Quick Search box not noticable enough? Do you think we need to make it more prominent?

*Shrugs shoulders* Your loss


As opposed to Foxtons which in my opinion looks like Cbeebies Too much going on.


Thanks for the feeedback Paul

I will be making a more accessible, text version of the site within the next few days (although this one is very accessible still), and this version will be fluid to the width of the screen.

The love thing is definitely something to look at as its a recurring comment. Any response from the ladies of the board on this, do you think its too much?

OK, I'll try increasing the letter spacing a little, see if that helps out.


How very true. Thank you.

lightning101

I like everything - very clear and concise.


I don't however like the mix of serif and san-serif on the main page

paulr

Angrynorth,
In one paragraph why is your site different to all the others.

TopBanana

I also think there's too much waffle. Some grammatical errors too.

angrynorth

Well, the seamless integration between mobile phone and site for one. I don't know about you but I have never come across and estate agent who lets you modify your own property description and images, or that gives you access to the visitor stats for your property so you can make educated decisions on how you approach your sale. How about the ability to talk directly with the seller without the need to visit?

paulr, would I be wrong in assuming you are an estate agent yourself? You seem to have a couple of gripes that appear to be "pot shots" rather than constructive which gives the impression this site touches a nerve with you.

TopBanana

I think this is better:

Thanks for dropping by. We're sure you'll just love our new service - we designed it with you in mind.

We've made the process of moving house as simple as possible. We've removed the barriers between you and your buyers. You can even constantly monitor us! Best of all, we've done it with love.

Not sure about the 'monitoring us' bit - it's more a case of monitoring the process surely?

angrynorth

Ahh, thank you. I will look through the copy and pick these errors out. Unfortunatley I am not a great writer so I tend to miss these things. I do intend to get a friend who is a copywriter to look through it before it goes final though. Thanks.

OllyK

RSS feed doesn't work and it points to a php script rather than the XML so browsers like Maxthon don't automatically pick up that there is a feed on the page.

Daryl

I think you should be able to view houses for sale without searching, ie just a clicky button to view all houses for sale.

Also, the prices are difficult to read in their current format.

Good luck

angrynorth

Hi Olly, I've just switched it to feedburner which should automatically change the content type and changed the http:// to feed://

Does this fix it?

Ta

angrynorth

I will add a search button to display all houses for sale asap.

Should have the price display tonight.

Thanks!

OllyK

Maxthon still doesn't pick it up on page load, which it normall does. Also on actually clicking the link I get "The page cannot be displayed"

angrynorth

Bugger.

I think I may have fixed it in feedburner though now.

OllyK

As an example - http://slashdot.org/ works just fine. Their link to the feed is: http://slashdot.org/index.rss so I am guessing the .rss extension is what Maxthon is looking for. I suppose I could look at the help file, but I really hate having to do that

angrynorth

I realised I have missed the auto discovery tags from the head, that is why it wasn't showing. Should be fixed (on the index.php) now.

OllyK

Detected...!

angrynorth

Woohoo

The RSS is one of my favourite things on the site so its great that it works now

Thanks for that!

paulr

Or a dropdown on search that gives the option of area,price,all,number of bedrooms.

paulr

You would be wrong yes,and sorry,but i thought my comments were constructive.

warrenm2

Make the menu options more distinctive (different font or bold or something) and slightly wider width

OllyK

Well Maxthon detects it and I can add it to Maxthon's RSS manager. The downside is, the 4 items that I get back are all dead links!

angrynorth

homeinfo.co.uk - now with bolder, wider menu

angrynorth

Hmm a deeper problem. It appears to be in the DB. Looking into it.