Dude, New S— Has Come to Light

Estately.com’s home page has grown up from the old blue box and random text. Today the front page gives you a look at the newest properties being added to Estately, describes Estately Agent Match (and actually features it), and still has that versatile search box that accepts addresses, MLS numbers, neighborhoods, zip codes, and cities.

Like Google, Doug and I created the original front page as an afterthought – we knew we needed a search box, but we weren’t much for designing something attractive or informative. We could however design something functional: a box with a button. All of our design-related efforts went into the map layout, which was much more about user-interface than about design. And so it was until this morning, when Shaun’s new design went live (did I mention we have a new front-end / designer dude dedicated to making Estately more usable?).

Also! It’s always been there, but now you can actually tell how easy it is to sort properties by price, square footage, bedrooms, or the number of days the property has been on, ahem, Estately. Just click the headers in the results list.

More changes! The photo browser still has nice big photos, but we’ve also added nice big arrows for navigating through the images. Nice big click areas are still there for clumsy clickers like myself.

(that’s sorting by days, in case you wondered)

We still have neighborhood outlines, the capacity to search by neighborhood, zip code or city, tons of information about local schools and parks, and suggested and comparable properties for all 40,000+ homes for sale on Estately.

(in case you didn’t catch the reference, see 2:20 into this clip)