This is the second in our series of posts presenting critiques of real estate brokerage home pages. Our objective is to offer constructive insights on design, usability, content and brand presentation. What you see below is admittedly a quick pass, but we hope you take away a thing or two.
This week we move from big to boutique. Surterre Properties is a small brokerage located in the most upscale areas of Orange County, California. We picked this site from the many submissions we received because it’s pretty darn good.
The design quality is generally good. It’s relatively uncluttered. A clear sense of place is established. And there’s a coherent visual brand expression.
But there’s always room for improvement, right?
We’ve used a cool app called Notable to present our critique. If you click on the “View interactive screenshot” link below you’ll be able to see our notes and the specific location on the page to which they refer.
Would you like your company site critiqued? Shoot us an email to info@1000wattconsulting.com.
Surterre Properties (surterreproperties.com)
View interactive screenshot | Download report from Scribd
- This is a convention that we would suggest *not* breaking. Most users will expect primary navigation at the top of the page. Moreover, people tend to read web pages like they do a book – they start at the top left and move to the right. Lastly, placing the primary nav in the middle of the home page makes it next to impossible to maintain consistent navigation throughout the site, which always makes things more confusing than they should be.
- This is an unconventional brand placement – and one that works here given the unconventional nature of the brand identity itself.
- It’s clear that the company is trying to evoke a strong connection to place and an association with the upscale lifestyle it offers. And they largely succeed. However, when the user hits the page it’s a good idea to make it very clear to them where they are and why they should stay. This page is currently missing the mark on that score. Some sort of headline, positioning statement or value proposition should go here.
- Form field labels should usually go above the field. This is a small convention that should not be broken. Think about how we read – top down.
- Given the relatively small market footprint, offering search by neighborhood or subdivision would likely get more people to what they’re looking for more quickly – always a good thing!
- It’s not a good idea to present a choice at this very important point of action. A simple “Show Properties” button would be preferable. In addition, in our experience, many users simply get lost in a map search interface. It’s better to present a “Map view” option on the search results page to accomodate those with the inclination and aptitude to view and refine results in this mode.
- Great idea to call out value-priced properties, but it would likely see more clicks with a short description of what, exactly, these are. “The most competitively priced listings, hand-picked by Surterre agents” for example.
- Generally not a good idea to call attention to the fact that you don’t have something people are inclined to want.
- This is an interesting idea, but it distracts from the most important tool on the page: the property search function. The auto-complete on the form field is a nice touch when entering a property address, but that parameter could be added to the main property search function. A site search function is a good idea on most websites, but in our experience with real estate sites, too many users confuse it for property search and end up lost.
- For a real estate site that’s all about selling luxury property, it seems odd that there are not photos or call-outs to some of the gorgeous active listings. People like to click on pictures – particularly great looking homes that are on the market. We’d replace this generic call-out with a filmstrip of active luxury listings in order to get people interacting with the site.
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Nice write up Brian. Surterre has a great reputation here in Orange County. Although not part of the homepage, Surterre has also done an excellent job of integrating our Dwellicious chiclet on their listing details page under “Share This Listing” tab.
Nice analysis. However, it makes me wonder if this type of analysis over-emphasizes the importance of homepages. While they certainly are important, they’re – more often than not – NOT the first page a visitor to a website will see, assuming the site is well indexed by Google.
Ed – you are right. These analyses do overemphasize the home page. But it’s what time permits
Brian: love your break-down and looking forward to the growing series here. And on another note, really diggin’ the notable app too…
[...] Another good exercise on breaking down a webpage. the 1000Watt guys seem to have a new series going where they break down elements on a webpage. You can learn a lot by reading the posts like Real estate home page breakdown: surterreproperties.com [...]
This is very interpersonal review. I love the look of the website. I like the fact that it is different and the menu bar is in the middle giving the ocean the spotlight. I like the logo placement and the simplicity of the side buttons.
I think the following statement is 100% wrong “but it would likely see more clicks with a short description of what, exactly, these are.” If you clutter up a website like the reviewer seems to like to do you lose your client. I immediately close a website that has too much text. If you added the verbiage he wants it would look more like an add.
The simplistic design of the webpage is great. In fact I think it could still use a little trimming down contrary to this review. I would make the blocks larger for the property search and push all the text at the bottom to below the screen.
My rule of thumb is no more than 6-10 words per line across an entire row on a website and no more than 20 rows of any type of text. If you need more you are doing something wrong.
I found that the ocean photo did not show up in Google Chrome when I viewed the website, it just showed a blank black area.
I really like the rounded corners and simplicity of the design (though they should match the colors at the rounded corners, and found the page load speed a bit slow (maybe they can move to a faster server or implement page speed fixes – use mozilla add-on to find them).
Overall I thought it was an interesting and attractive homepage.
Great analysis. I appreciate the reminder that people read from top down. I need to check my forms to make sure headers are above the text boxes.
Don’t they all? There are at least a few ways to look at it. IT companies need bus. folks to operate; to move up, you need to have as much of a grasp as possible for both sides. Almost every business in the country has their own need for all levels of IT integration. Finally, most tech co’s are dependent on business applications to stay afloat. All you have to do is decide which angle you want to pursue.