This video contains a run through of the Shaws of Kensington website design that you have asked us to “Lift & Shift” onto the Homeflow platform. It identifies 6-7 major areas of recommendation (covered in a 2 minute summary upfront). Then there are a bunch of minor suggested tweaks and ideas peppered through the video. We recommend all of them, obviously, as that’s why we highlight them.
All you need to do, is watch it through – with pen and paper in hand, and note whether you just “Agree with all of it” / “Don’t want any of it” / “Only want these bits” / “Don’t want these bits”. Once we have that list agreed, we can get started. There is a crib sheet of the ideas pasted in below the video too.
Homepage/general
http://devcon2.co.uk/shaws/index.html
- Add clickable links to location searches as an image map from the carousel image.
- Don’t use an exposed “mailto:” for the email addresses, instead link to contact page, with exposed contact form to gather intelligence on the user instead
- BIG: Need to make space for a user profile system for the site generally – (allowing for saved properties, saved searches, and the all important email alerts. Later this leads on to opportunities for integration with back office systems, and intelligence gathering on what users are looking at on your site, and whether they are potential vendors, etc.) It is a strong recommendation from us.
- We could add in featured properties (though not a recommendation we think is important)
- Make link of property address clickable (not just the view link) – better for SEO, and usability
Content pages
http://devcon2.co.uk/shaws/sales.html
http://devcon2.co.uk/shaws/lettings.html
- Fix up the drop downs (min price / max price) on lettings
- Pull the bottom content blob into the main article flow (for it’s positioning on mobile phone)
- Make the other article links roll over with a hover state of green to encourage linking through where they are articles
- Add ability to add in further “promo pods” flexibly onto content pages, rather than doing them as fixed pages
Valuation page
http://devcon2.co.uk/shaws/valuations.html
- Line up top of boxes
- Ditch the “breadcrumb” trail
- Remove the exposed contact email addresses
- Think about rationalising form fields (to prevent form submission rate being over the “roll off” point)
- Make the pods flexible
About shaws page/ meet team
http://devcon2.co.uk/shaws/shaws.html
- Ditch breadcrumb (indeed ditch it throughout)
- Add brand new separate staff pages
- Shorten existing staff bios – get’s more visible on page, and creates one more click opportunities going through
- IMPORTANT: Ditch the heavy CSS rollover effects (slow and punishing to SEO in the browser)
- Remove the exposed email addresses, link instead to contact / register page
Contact Page
http://devcon2.co.uk/shaws/contact.html
- All fine in broad terms, though maybe make this a general registration, first and last name
- Maybe add a photo to this page to liven it up…
- …or a side bar pod which you can flexibly content manage in the future
Search results
http://devcon2.co.uk/shaws/search.html
- Ditch breadcrumb
- Ensure you have an SEO descriptive location title
- Consider infinite scroll instead of pagination
- Consider switching the whole partial “Swells” – and instead dropping this back to just photo swells, better for cross browser and mobile performance, and possibly for SEO, without loosing much of the whizzy design chemistry in the process
- More details NOT Arrange Viewing (far to high a “commitment” set of wording)
- Please provide us with a Map page design (or we can take out the map page button)
- Or we can design it, and we could even add in draw a search if so (though that is beyond scope)
Property details page
http://devcon2.co.uk/shaws/search.html
- Ditch breadcrumb
- Add sub photos onto Carousel (unless you particularly don’t want them)
- Add staff profile photos – increases conversion rate – but where to put them on page, and how to choose the staff member (several options)
- Bring Return to search up to the top – “above” the property it refers to
- Add in Next and Previous property (to encourage one more click) – alongside that moved button
- Add in a “Save to wishlist button” (not mentioned in video)
- Add in Streetview?
- Add in a row of similar properties at the bottom of the page – to encourage one more click
- Consider dropping the search form from page (especially in mobile view)
- Consider adding sticky bottom menu (“email” / “call” buttons) a la Rightmove
Thanks for watching!