Hooke & MacDonald is one of the major real estate agencies in Ireland, specially in the new homes market. They requested 4pm to come up with a new website that is modern in looks and features, reflecting the same high quality standards they have been keeping since 1967.

This site is one of the most complete projects 4pm has ever done. It includes: Google Maps integration, Content Management System, Video support, User Registration, Favourite List Management, 4 different ways of searching properties and the 4pm`s Property Drive solution.

I was in charge of the design and front-end development. Here are the main screenshots:

Coldwell Banker is a world wide known real estate company with a wide range of property markets such as Residential Homes, Apartments, Land, Holiday Homes as well as Industrial, Commercial and Retail. Their Irish branch, Coldwell Banker Ireland, contacted 4pm to create a new portal for their head office where the users could find all information about the Irish agencies and properties available.

Web Site

In this project I was in charge of the design and the front-end development. Being a huge company with many branches around the world, they have a strong identity standard manual that has to be followed in every design project. This is good and bad at the same time. Having a colour scheme, fonts and graphics ready for you can be helpful, but they can limit your choices of design.

The main focus of the website is to be a portal for the Irish agencies display their properties. Here I’ll display the 3 main screens of this project: frontpage, listing page and property details page.
On the homepage, the main real estate markets are displayed as buttons on the left hand side:

On the listing page, we summarize the main information from each property:

On the property details page, we display all the property info focusing on the gallery and map location:

You can check the website running at: www.coldwellbanker.ie

In this project I was requested to not only redesign their current page but to come up with 2 animated banner ads, which will be featured on the main portals in Ireland. The company, iWord is specialized in mobile messaging solution and has been on the market since 2004.

Web Site

Based on the logo designed by my good friend Daniel Falcão, the web site has a big area explaining the 3 easy steps to create your account with iWord and start using. Below this area, the secondary links to content pages.

Click the image below to view in full-size.

Banner Ads

I had a really good time designing the banner ads. It’s not something I’m used to do. In fact, it’s been months since the last time I’ve used Adobe Flash. But I’m really happy with the results. The 2 banners were done in 2 different sizes.

Style A

Style B

iWord

The design and html files were handed to the client who would be in charge of filling the content.
Their website is www.iword.ie – Last time I checked they were using different styles on the homepage, so it’s possible that the current website is not 100% as the layout displayed here.

Have you ever wondered if your design process is the right one for your projects? Have you ever thought that maybe there’s a step missing or maybe a specific phase that needs more emphasis on? After doing some research on the subject I found out that Elliot Jay Stocks, a very cool designer from the UK, had recently written a book about this called Sexy Web Design published by Sitepoint, a cool Aussie based book publisher and web & design reference website.

Overall idea of the book

In this book, Elliot shows you his process of creating a sexy website, from the initial briefing with the client to the final updates on the mockup. The author explains the purpose of each phase, exemplifies showing successful websites online and applies the proper technique on a demo project that is covered throughout the book.

Although the book covers a lot of content, the book doesn’t go very deep on each of them and some topics are left with just a few lines of explanation. Elliot tries to fix this issue by giving external references but sadly they are mostly to Sitepoint links or their books, which sound a little biased. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a frequent reader of Sitepoint‘s website but it wouldn’t hurt to throw a few more references.

The highlights

The chapter which covers inspiration and mood on websites is spot on just like the briefing and initial sketches approach suggested by the author. I like the idea of spending more time away from the computer to get your mind in the right place.

Conclusion

I would really recommend this book to any web designer. Even if you are sure that your design process is good enough for your projects, there’s always something interesting that lights a bulb in your head.