Looking as Good as You Work

Estately has an award-winning map search (thank you Inman News and others!), but our front page has never been a contender for a beauty contest: until now we’ve been too busy making the functionality of Estately phenomenal with a limited team. The ugly search box sat there while we pushed out a series of only-on-Estately features like: search for homes in a geography or let them add a mile or two (here are homes for sale within a mile of Avondale, Chicago). We show you local transit stops for all 500,000+ homes in our database (including Seattle’s new Link Light Rail line) and even include the environmental one-two punch of letting you search for high walk score properties near transit.

But we’ve gone further: in the last 9 months, we’ve launched:

• faster search and pageloads
• better balloons on the map search (with buttons to quickly view all photos for a home)
• auto-complete for addresses, neighborhoods, and cities from the search box
• a new easy-to-use search interface
• and the capacity to scroll through condos in the window on the map

Behind the scenes we ripped out and refactored tons of our code, so Estately is more stable and we can make changes even faster. Right now we ship improvements and updates 3-4 times a day (seriously: we release new code multiple times a day).

At the beginning of July we were at a crossroads: we have some features we are really excited about in our pipeline, but our front page really made people think the site was created by a couple of guys in their basement. And let the record show that we are bigger and better than that: we are now a handful of guys (and a lady!) in some of Seattle’s cheapest office space.

More importantly, the homepage wasn’t representative of the experience. We are proud of Estately (and are eager to continue building on it), but until today it was hard to fight your way past the front-page experience.  which is not a good starting point in an industry where people judge you in 5 seconds.

It was time for our front page to reflect how good the rest of the site is. Behold our new front page! It looks incrementally better as you move from Internet Explorer 6 to 7 to 8 and then to Firefox / Safari or Chrome.

The primary objective of our front page is still the same: get people to search as quickly as possible. For our visitors who have never seen or heard of Estately, we now aim to be more informative, to let people know which markets we are in, that we have the most comprehensive index of homes for sale, updated many times a day from the MLS, and, in a softer sense, that we care about details.

Our aim was to make the front page look as elegant as the rest of the site works (if that makes any sense).

We’d love your feedback.