Next Chapter Group Website

Overview

The Next Chapter Group website promotes Realtor services by Ryan Smith, a Realtor for SW Washington State and Portland Oregon communities. I was the sole designer and developer for this project.

Goals

  • To design responsive, professional Realtor’s website that would match that of the local competition. The design needed to incorporate and reflect the Next Chapter Group logo and brand that was already available.
  • To develop the website based on the design within a content management system that has an automatic RMLS property feed of homes in the market in the targeted area.

Challenges

  1. Becoming familiar with local Realtor and Real Estate websites and what they have in common.
  2. Selecting a Content Management System (CMS) that would best support Ryan and will provide plugins for dynamic components to optimize development time.
  3. Choosing an Internet Data Display (IDX) service for feeding real estate listings to the website. We needed and IDX service that’s affordable, reliable, easy to implement, supports our desired CMS, and agile enough for me to make style changes to it.
  4. Completing the entire project within 5 months on a part-time schedule.

Approach

In the beginning, all I had to work with was a logo to help me come up with a color and font scheme. I also began competitive analysis research of other local Realtor and real estate websites. This helped develop a navigation and content strategy for the website. I worked on the overall design by drafting high-fidelity wireframes in Adobe XD to present to the client. I also used the wireframes as a style guide in the development phase. The website design exceeded the client’s expectations.

We chose to use WordPress for the CMS because of it’s vast library of plugins. There were also multiple IDX services to choose from that had WordPress plugins we could install to our website. We chose to use IDX Broker as our RMLS property feed service since it met our requirements and had a good reputation. I developed a static HTML, CSS, JavaScript prototype of the home page and used that to build out a custom WordPress theme. This custom theme included the Bootstrap 4 framework to optimized development time. This led to the production phase where site assets were rendered and uploaded, pages were created and developed, and final polishing was done within the stylesheets.

Result

The website was launched on time, and Ryan was more than pleased with how it looked and how easy it was for him to add content. I had a lot of fun with this project because it was an end-to-end project where I had complete creative freedom with branding, based off of an existing logo. I also became more familiar with developing custom themes within WordPress.

Work

Website template wireframes

Templates and components were drafted within high-fidelity wireframes with placeholder imagery and text. I began working on the smaller screen size and moved forward into tablet/desktop view. I also focused on font, color and other branding elements of the website through these wireframes to determine the voice and personality of the website.