Design Builders
A website built around you
Design Builders built their first home in 1992. Now they are known as New Zealand’s designers and builders of unique award-winning homes. Working with you, they develop initial ideas, refine them, create plans and elevations and, when all is ready, build to the highest standards.
Background
Over 25 years of
award-winning homes
Design Builders design and build one-off architectural homes throughout New Zealand. No existing plans, templates, or catalogues; instead, they work with their customers to create a unique home designed and built just for you, inspired by you.
The homes they create are all different, but they start the same way: with a blank sheet of paper and a client who wants a great original home.
Strategy
The blueprint
We began our engagement with a comprehensive strategy workshop to engage all stakeholders at a higher level. Through detailed analysis of the existing website we drilled down to what we wanted to achieve with the new website. We concluded the website goals to be:
Increase Presence
Increase the presence of the company’s offering and industry knowledge through intuitive design and content strategies over the site.
Website To Be More
On Brand
Higher quality of presentation for the business. Improve imagery, plans, messaging, and tone of voice.
Improve User
Experience
Improve UX of the site to prompt key enquiry points and overall experience of using the site.
Website Traffic
Focus on website traffic and customers with a digital strategy that spans across owned, paid and earned channels in the digital space.
User Journey Map
A full persona set was developed for the website. The objective of this exercise was to develop a range of key archetypes to help the NZD design team understand the end users of the site, and more importantly to focus on the user insights and goals prior to starting the user experience design stage of the project.
We developed a journey map for each of our user personas so we could visualise the process that a person goes through in order to accomplish a goal, this gave us valuable insight and understanding regarding common customers’ pain points.
Wireframing
A solid foundation
Armed with all the information from the workshop, the design team started to work on the wireframes for the site for both desktop and mobile. This allowed us to create a solid page structure before the design is fully implemented.
We visually worked through the hierarchy of the user journey, this included addressing any discomfort felt by our personas to create an industry leading browsing experience on all devices.
Design
Designed with the
user in mind
Having an existing partnership with Design Builders, the brand looked to NZD to strategise and design their website that would fix a disjointed user experience and refresh messaging and to reach it’s key audiences.
Location, location, location
The partners of Design Builders are the core of the business and we made it easier than ever for users to find their Regional Partners.
We gave each region its own dedicated hub. This provides contact touchpoints, bios, showhome information, awards and related news for that region.
Read all about it
One of the key goals of the site was to Increase the presence of the company’s offering and industry knowledge through the content it’s producing, so we had to rethink the way we used the news and events section.
The News section was streamlined and refined to include tagging of articles for users to find what they wanted easier.
Let’s get started
Let’s get started provides users with a clear path on their journey to a new home, Knockdown and rebuild, Looking for land and Ready to build.
Each of the sections has its own dedicated page providing insightful and useful information. With call to actions throughout to prompt enquiry
WordPress Development
Ready, Steady Build
The marketing team at Design Builders is responsible for managing the content across all 15 regional locations. This often results in a lot of duplicate content that would need to be entered in separately.
To streamline this process, we built the WordPress CMS utilising dynamic custom fields that could allow content management from a single-instance, including information that doesn’t require duplicate content.
The website gave the Design Builders an intuitive platform that could easily support multiple needs, so they could focus on what matters most, providing their customers inspiration and insightful content that would encourage them to make the first steps of building a dream home.
The Results
Get inspired
Design Builders new digital platform successfully highlights the unique homes they build along with the quality and experience the brand has to offer. The site applies beautiful design and logical functionality that puts its competitors to shame. To confirm this, at launch the site saw increased website engagement and time spent on site.
