Completing The Trilogy
Early this summer, we made a goal to move through Estately, rip out things that were no longer necessary and double down on making what works work even harder. We started with the homepage because it gave us the chance to rethink our brand and it was technically the least difficult part of the site to update.
We followed with an update of our map search, making the map bigger, moving the search options, making the balloon that pops up on search results use every pixel effectively – we actually rolled our own balloon so we could get larger photos and more information while actually taking up less space on the map – and bringing beautiful, photo-rich results to the sidebar.
The “Return of the King” page we are updating today gets as many eyeballs as our search pages and our homepage: it’s the “detail page” – the page that shows every little detail of a single property right down to the type of furnace and the nearby bus stops.
So without further ado, here is what is new.
Bigger Photos
If our old pictures told 1,000 words, our new photos tell around 2,500 words. Photos now take up the majority of the real estate (pun intended) when you come to a home for sale page. We have also made the photo gallery even easier to peruse: clicking anywhere on the gallery takes you to the next photo.
Cleaner Layout
We have eliminated the search results that used to clutter up the side of the page to make room for bigger photos and better structured information. This is a surprisingly controversial – we’ve had some customers ask for the sidebar back – but we think we have a solution that will please both the die-hard options-galore-loving junky (sort of the prototypical Windows XP user) and the laser-focused home viewer.
We also joined the rest of the internet and fully committed to a fixed-width details page, meaning it looks pretty similar no matter how big or small your monitor is.
More Compact Amenities
The amenities used to take up over half a page. No longer! We pulled out my parents’ old can crusher and packed the amenities into a concise little list. We still have some organizing to do with the new list, but yowza, people uninterested in unsexy-but-very-important septic systems who just want to see the closest school can get there much faster now.
Faster loading
As usual, there are a bunch of behind-the-scenes improvements with this release that make Estately’s search snappier and let us make changes faster. When you click on a link from a saved search email or when you send a listing to your friend, the details page will load faster than ever. Give it a whirl in DC. Ding!
But That’s Not All!
We have a few more releases – including an industry first – that we are excited to be releasing in the coming two weeks.
