Discovery
Competitor Analysis was done on key competitors to compare against our initial thoughts and benchmarking was also done.
An extensive heuristics analysis was done on the existing websites to find points of weakness that could be improved. Some key takeaways were an abundance of content redundancies mainly due to their being no consistent content structure, Inconsistent navigation, a large number of dead ends.
IA & wireframes
Information Architecture was a key consideration as the Navigation and content sections were poorly labelled and contained a lot of redundancies throughout the four websites. A big challenge was the naming conventions for the Navigation as certain pages contained a mix of content that wasn’t easily catagorised.
Based on the above we developed wireframes, with a clear goal in mind to incorporate the large amount of information from four websites into a concise and easily navigable experience. Research showed that users interacted with the “Agent, Area, Office” search on the existing site, so that feature was made more prominent.
Content sections weren’t clearly defined leading to a sense of being overwhelmed, so whitespace was increased site wide.
Creative design
Design for the UI has to be as neutral as possible while also creating areas of interest that we could easily altered when the final branding was complete.
The gold colour was used as a highlight to draw the users eye and imagery was boosted in size and prominence to better create an aspirational mood throughout the website and to let users clearly explore the properties.
Development
The new web experience was built on a well known open source platform “Umbraco” that was customised to the clients needs and was super easy to use to update content. From there we complete the UAT process and packaged up the final site for hosting by the clients I.T team on their chosen environment.
