A New Home Page, Video and Luxury Program for BHGRealEstate.com

Posted on 07. Jul, 2009 by Jason Steele

Today we have rolled out our most significant changes to the BHGRealEstate.com consumer web site since we launched almost a year ago.

The prep work actually began on July 24th 2008, the day after we launched publicly at Real Estate Connect in San Francisco.  Anyone who has ever built a web site with a fixed deadline and budget knows lots of features and functions fall off the cart as launch day approaches.  Those features and usability tweaks became the foundation for today’s redesign.  As September (2008) approached, we  felt it was imperative to get some outside consumer perspective, as it is easy to  overlook obvious flaws internally staring at the site for almost 6 straight months.  You can check out some of the findings in a post entitled “Building a consumer site in a vacuum,” I wrote earlier this year.  Lastly, we have been working on growing our editorial strategy from both a written and video perspective so we needed a better delivery/merchandising mechanism.  That’s how any sound web development project should start, with a list of requirements and clearly defined objectives.

Our 4 objectives were:

Reduce branding space and make property search more prominent to drive more traffic to our affiliates

Our old site used too much of the home page real estate for branding so consumers were very confused as to what they should do first on our site.  Our usability study validated this definitively.  We have a very a strict philosophy of delivering the highest percentage of consumer web site traffic to our affiliates in the least amount of clicks possible.  Today there is a clear hierarchy of action when you land on our home page.

Provide flexibility to more easily merchandise video and written content
With some extensive tweaks to our content management system we now have the ability to surface previously buried content from our Live and Learn sections to our home page.  We believe this is one of our key differentiators as a brand- to connect with consumers before, during and after the real estate buying and selling process through written word and moving pictures.

Highlight our new video platform and Premier Selection program
Today our video section houses all of our originally shot video from Stephen Saint-Onge as well as any licensed video from various sources.  In total we have launched with over 40 videos and quickly look to grow our library before the end of the year.  This is all made possible by Brightcove, the top video platform employed by web media companies such as NYTimes.com, AOL.com and WashingtonPost.com.  It was very important to choose a flexible/robust platform as it gives us the freedom in the future to implement a national and local video strategy all controlled centrally by the brand.  Unique playlists can be developed for affiliates, individually highlighting topics appropriate to their local market.  The great part about the video platform is the ease of which our affiliates can implement it locally.  With two clicks they can take our exact video player with all of the associated videos and put it on their site.

Our Premier Selection program makes its way onto our site with a robust landing page which showcases our foray into the luxury real estate market.  This page was also built to be “portable” for our affiliates, as we have made the Flash introduction and the HTML all available so they will be able to implement an identical version locally if they wish to do so.

Provide as much of the assets for the enhancements to our affiliates
At the outset of this project we made it very clear that we wanted to give our affiliates the ability to piggyback off of our investment in world class web design, development and licensed platforms.  That is why we produced supporting assets such as a robust style guide, HTML with CSS, images, icons and flash all with the intent of allowing our affiliates to replicate the new look/layout seamlessly and cost effectively.

I encourage you to take a look and let me know what you think, as I have already begun thinking about the next evolution of our consumer web site.  Don’t be shy as we have already had an overwhelming response via our social media channels.  Below are a few excerpts to get the ball rolling:

Posted by Jason Steele in Marketing, Technology Tags: Agents, AOL.com, BHGRE, Brightcove, brokers, Buying, consumers, Content Management Systems, Content Strategy, CSS, Facebook, Flash, HTML, Icons, inman connect, Key Differentiators, listings, Luxury Homes, New York Times, Online Video, Premier Selection, san francisco, selling, social media, Stephen Saint-Onge, twitter, Usability Testing, Video, Washington Post, www.bhgrealestate.com