SecureASale - Sell Your House Quickly

The Matt. · September 11th, 2008, 10:52 AM

SecureASale is London's leading homebuyer, specialising in property in N & NW London. Put simply, for some people waiting for the property market to pick up is not an option (I.e. If they are going to be repossessed etc) so therefore receiving 90% of their property asking price in cash makes perfect sense.

Anyway, here is the new site we created for them - honest critiques welcome.

http://www.secureasale.co.uk

aestheticloveinc · September 11th, 2008, 03:32 PM

The page 4 on 'How it Works' has overlapping text which is a little bit distracting.

I think the drop down effect on SecureASell key features should already be dropped and not hidden like how it is listed by default since it was I would assume where primarily most of the sell is made, is talking about the features it has.

I do like the calculator and the other tools listed on the site since I think it would be useful since I used something similar on edmunds.com when finding out approximately how much my used Cougar would be worth before trading it in.

I didn't have time to really click every link and read every thing listed but overall it seemed easy to navigate, and that the error I listed was the only thing that jumped out at me.

Good Job.

Alex Rehm · September 11th, 2008, 04:24 PM

Hiya,

I think overall the colour scheme looks very nice and the site has potential. A couple of things I would look at:

Flash animation "refer a friend": Is there any reason as to why you chose to display the offer that way? What you are creating is an illusion of being a non-site ad or one of those "page created by myspace page generator" banners. Meaning this animation has hardly any value. I was reluctant clicking on it. Now that I did I am sad I wasted time bothering. There are much better ways to show the offer within the site, so why not do that?
Navigation: no home link? -> Accessibility / usability issue
Home page - how it works / how we can help: This is a nice approach, but why not let the animation run on its own if not being clicked on for a while?
I think overall this approach hides more information than necessary. It seems to me as if you want to save space, but for the wrong reasons at times. This goes for the whole site
Home page - key features: you are hiding important information behind a "+" here. Why?
How can we help pages: I am not sure the page layout works for you. You have a lot of content, but users have to crawl through a number of clicks to actually get to the core of the information they are after. The "How can we help you" main page is hiding a lot of good information behind only 2-3 lines. There is really no reason for that
How can we help pages: vital cross-linking and call to actions are not present
Where we buy page: would a map not do? Or at least add value?
How it works page: I have been in the legal business for some time, I would be amazed that your time is 1 week! If you are claiming this then at least back it up with testimonials, case studies, articles about this. "Proof, or it didn't happen". You have a link to the Times page, but that still doesn't tell your customers you're any good I'm afraid
Why use us page: Here you are using a different layout as opposed to the layout you established under "How can we help you". Is there a reason? Why not merge both layouts - best of both worlds?

I think overall the site looks very good, but the layout and overall usability (and content) need a bit more work here and there. The "How can we help you" section for example is big, but it doesn't do anything. I can imagine that many users would drop off here and go elsewhere.

Hope this helps,
ALEX