I love minimalistic styling. When designing allhouseprices.com, I removed any piece of content that was not needed. I chose a pattern for the background and green as dominating colour. Other shades of green are used to style other parts of the website, like the chart, and the breadcrumbs. Many elements (logo, search box) have a dotted border. I think, these details makes the site more contained, and helps building brand identity.
Padding
I love white space, and I’ve added a lot of it to allhouseprices.com. The large padding around page elements helps separate those elements, e.g. header from content. This is the single main advice I give to non-designers (like myself :)), add more padding around your content parts.
Header
The header for allhouseprices.com has the logo on the left and the main links on the right hand-side of the page. This is a very common layout, and even though it won’t win any awards for innovation, it is familiar with most users. Thus, one thing less to learn for them. In other words, every elements is where the users expect to be.
The logo is not an image, but an HTML element. Using the same patterned background, I wanted to give the idea that it is like someone took off a bit from page to reveal the logo. I’m not sure how much that comes through though.
Search box
It’s important to have a focus point on a page, which directs the user on how to use it, what to do next, without them thinking about it. The first step that the users need to take on allhouseprices.com is to search for an area (postcode). Therefore, a big search box stands in its own space, difficult to miss. The round corners give the box a bit of style and smoothness, creating an easiness on user’s perception (as opposed to square boxes). Together with the magnifying glass identify a familiar search utility.
Content
Following simplicity, the content of the page on allhouseprices.com is a list of house sales, showing the sale date, sale price and property address. This is all information needed by the user, and it’s laid out simply in a tabular style. Different styles are used to differentiate and emphasize data parts. E.g. price uses a condensed font, the property info (Freehold / Semi attached) are in all caps, in a paler color.
Footer
The footer groups all the links of the site, and allhouseprices.com is no exception. Another version of the logo, and the patterned background, encourages familiarity with the brand.