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How We Helped R&H Stand Out: Homepage Video Story.
With each new website we build, we try to innovate and push boundaries. For luxury home builder Romanelli & Hughes’ website, we created this “Homepage Video Story.”.
We want to build you more than just a video that looks pretty. We want it to tell a story. A story that can show your audience what you’re best at, and what sets you apart from your competitors. Even just a 20 second video story, can tell your customers more about what you can do for them, than a traditional slideshow.
Moving video to your homepage.
Right now, video is everything to social media, but it doesn’t to only live there. Why wouldn’t you want to educate and entertain your audience right on your website? With video, it’s easy to make your website stand out from your competitors, who most likely have a simple video, slideshow, or no video presence on their websites.
More than just a beautiful face.
In addition to Romanelli & Hughes’ beautiful homes, there’s a complex database behind-the-scenes. The system allows anyone to search by community, homes ready now, school districts, single family or maintenance-free villa homes, starting prices, bedrooms, and bathrooms. To make that happen, an elaborate database was built to tie together all that information.
What’s in the website for the sales agents.
As part of the database, sales agents – often more than one – had to be associated with specific communities, with all their contact information. So we also built in a section that allows their sales agents to download documents placed there by the marketing department. This includes a database of spec homes that has to change dynamically as new homes are built, or sold.
Behind-the-scenes of the new website.
There’s a lot of moving parts in this website, including site maps for each community, with information on individual lots, shown in this community map of “Coffman Park.”
Each lot is colorized depending on its status:
- Green for an available home
- Blue for an available lot
- Purple for a model home
- Yellow for a reserved lot, and
- Red for a sold lot
Of course, the lot colors can easily be changed when the status of the lot, or home, changes.
In addition to each lot being color-coded for easy reference, each lot also has a pop up window when you roll your cursor over it, as you can see in the screen shot below.
Clicking the “Click to View” link on the pop-up window, takes you to that specific home, as shown on the screen shot of that landing page (below).
When you need a website to reflect your beautiful homes.
If you’re a home builder and are proud of your homes (and why wouldn’t you be?!), you should also be proud of your website.
If you build in multiple communities, with multiple home styles, you’d want a web design firm who has the expertise to build complex relational databases to cross-reference, and cross-search homes.
Even if you only build 5 or 10 high-end custom homes a year, your website needs to reflect the homes you build, and appeal to the high-end home buyer’s sense of style. And the way to do that is to have custom website designed to emulate the details, characteristics and details of your homes.
In addition to the Romanelli website, we’ve done their SEO.
Even if you’re a smaller home builder, and aren’t looking for a Romanelli & Hughes-sized website, remember, no site is too small for SEO.
As a matter of fact, since your competitor’s websites have been around a while, it’s even more important to incorporate SEO into your new website. Otherwise, the chances of getting on your prospect’s radar are relegated to word-of-mouth (which we agree, is the best way to get your name out).
However, there are more people who don’t know you (or us) than do. Which is why using SEO (also called content marketing) and social media, is the best way to get your company name in front of people who might not know who you are yet.
Make sure you find a good Columbus SEO company to help with your website’s SEO. Just because a web design firm can design your site, doesn’t mean they know about SEO.
