B&L Properties is focused on providing quality student housing, responsive service, and affordable prices. They had reached a point where they were expanding into new markets, and knew that their existing website was neither representing their brand well, nor creating the sort of engaging, eminently useful experience that they needed to stand out from their emerging competitors. We worked together to comb through their story and find key talking points to hang their hat on. Design and message had to weave together to create a fresh and spot-on site that fit the audience’s desires and questions like a glove. They knew their primary sale was to the youth market, but that their messaging needed to also connect with the secondary audience that would be a key factor in the sales process – student parents.

In reworking the overall brand experience, we completely reshaped how prospects look through properties – going from a simple linked list to a sortable, filterable breakout of all properties that allows users to select which criteria are most important to them. When on a property page, the interface dynamically provides a “Schedule a Showing” button, or a “Taken” badge based on the “booked date” entered in the admin for that property (and it resets automatically when that date is passed!). Knowing that our audience was college students, we even tucked an “Easter egg” into the FAQ section. Finally, the site was fissioned off to create a duplicate site (with different content) for an additional market. The final result is two sites running off of the same Drupal installation, so that content updates are completely separate, while functional updates are done to a shared codebase.