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:

Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer, Opera. Developing websites to match all these browsers is no easy job. And don’t even start talking about the different release versions. You can’t force your visitor to use a specific software but your budget is limited and you can’t create a whole new html for each one of them.

Luckily the modern versions of these browsers are relatively compatible, one difference here, another there. Nothing that a separate stylesheet or a reset css can’t solve. One of them, however, take this to the extreme. Yes, I am talking about the evil IE6.

Losing Support?

IE6 is so full of bugs and rendering problems that several websites are not supporting it any more. Digg, Youtube, Orkut and all 37 signals products (Basecamp, Campfire…) just to name a few. Personally I don’t design for IE6 unless the client specifically asks for it.

To Do or Not To Do

It is a tough decision to make, even tougher without the proper information. A good start is to analyse the average visitor of your (or your clients) website. Check their OS, browser software and work from there.

If a significant portion of the visitors have outdated browser then you might have no choice but to design for them. There are some information out there that can help you with the most common issues.

In case you have no traffic data you can check generic worldwide statistics. W3C, StatCounter and ADTECH (Europe) are a few places that display this information online. Be aware that these statistics represent a very wide audience that maybe don’t represent your audience. In this website for instance, less then 1% of my visitors use IE6. Mainly because this website`s targets are developers, designers and general web-savvy people.

Happy End?

According to W3Schools, IE6 dropped 6% from January to September of this year. So lets be positive and one day we won’t have to bother about this particular browser. I mean, even Microsoft launched a campaign to promote browser upgrade. Fingers crossed!

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

It’s great to see how much the use of textures in websites has increased in the past months. They are an effective way of adding flavour and fun to the design. I love taking pictures of walls, bricks, or surfaces around the city and analyse the pattern that they bring to the whole subject. In this article I’ll share some tips that I try to put in practise when photographing textures.

Using Textures

In web design, textures are commonly used to give a touch of reality or even to bring a tactile sensation to the project. Textures can also be used as natural references for digital creations.

Photographing Textures

Taking a good texture photo is not rocket science – but there are a few tricks that can reduce the amount of post work on Photoshop.

The first one is angle. A parallel shot is normally what you are looking for – so try to keep in the same level as the surface. The second one is sharpness - a texture should be always well defined. If you want a blurry texture, it’s better to use effects and manipulate it later on, but always keep the original texture sharp. My third and final advice is to pay attention to lighting. When shooting outdoors photos, try different times of the day for different results. Cloudy days are usually the best as there is no direct light on the subject.

Samples

Here is a selection of texture photos available on my Flickr set:

Feel free to bookmark this set as I intend to frequently update it from now on. Cheers!

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.