Creating a Flexible Theming Framework

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Client

Services

Overview

A multifamily real estate development company asked Velir to find a scalable approach to managing the sub-branding for their 60+ luxury apartment websites. Based on research about property types and décor styles, we created a design system around three audiences and property types in Acquia Site Studio. Leveraging Site Studio’s preconfigured themes and templates, we established a user-friendly platform that allows the client’s marketing team to build, deploy, and maintain consistent, customized sites on the fly, without agency assistance

A grid of iPhone screens displaying pages from various residential community sites.

The three unique audiences identified by the client: High-Rise, Urban, and Luxury — Images and patterns we created to represent the three prioritized audiences and property types identified by the client: High-Rise, Urban, and Luxury.

Challenge

With 60+ luxury apartment communities, the client was looking for a scalable approach to manage sub-branding for their property websites. To do this, they hoped to provide their content marketers with modern web authoring tools, specifically Acquia Site Studio, on a single scalable platform that allowed them to adopt sub-brand theming through a flexible design framework.

As part of our design discovery, the client identified three prioritized audiences and property types: high-rise, urban, and luxury. With these audiences and properties in mind, our design system approach had to be mindful of the sub-branding considerations required to spin up distinct property websites using a set number of themes.

The key challenges were:

Equipping the centralized marketing team with a flexible universal set of themes that meets the digital needs of their three unique audiences and property types and a highly distributed team of regional property marketing managers
Using themes to enable the client's marketers with a self-service model for website creation, reducing reliance on outside agencies to produce one-off designs for each sub-property website—accelerating time to market from months to days and weeks

Approach

In our discovery, we worked with the client to establish a framework for how theming could be leveraged through the design process. We reviewed key property types offered by the client, conducted an analysis of decor styles that influenced homebuilding across the nation, and looked to express these home design aesthetics through web design.

During our design phase, we priortized high-rise, urban, and luxury property types. These property types were most common in the client's portfolio of homes, and represented a broad aesthetic look, one that could be applied universally with very minor changes to typography and color schemes.

Our approach included:

Identifying key property types and aesthetics, and looking at the design influences across these property types
Reviewing existing branding for prioritized property types, and translating these into flexible theming structures within Acquia Site Studio
Designing three universal themes that reflect the key property types: high-rise, urban, luxury—and creating style guides to inform usage and guidance

Screenshots of PowerPoint slides with the design framework we proposed to the client — Slides detailing the design theming framework that we developed and presented to the client.

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Solution

We leveraged Site Studio’s preconfigured Themes and Helper Templates, which allow community websites to be quickly created and modified. We used them to offer three themes based on property type, market, and style. The themes allow key property brand elements to be customized, while delivering unique community websites on the fly.

Results

A structured yet flexible system that allows the client to maintain brand consistency across all communities
A consistent site framework that can roll out to 60+ luxury apartment community sites by the end of 2020
A user-friendly platform that allows the client to build, deploy, and maintain sites without agency partner assistance

Three final branded themes

We designed three themes based on property type, market, and style.

Screenshots of designs based on the High-Rise theme — The High-Rise theme is geared towards residents looking for “modern” and “elevated” features in their living space. So the design explores offset treatments around imagery and overlapping typography for a more unique look that is textured, and full of depth.

Screenshots of designs based on the Urban theme — The Urban theme is targeted towards residents looking for a clean, modern, and community-oriented living space. This theme explores a cleaner look with less visual clutter, an inspiration we took from sleek and modern space-conscious apartment blocks in the city.

Title

Screenshots of designs based on the Luxury theme — The Luxury theme is geared towards audiences looking for elegance and sophistication. So, the design conveys a cleaner, more sophisticated look and feel, with a subtle use of the modular color blocks and imagery with little-to-no overlapping.

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