Website Rebrand

Chartford Homes

The brief


Chartford Homes are one of the leading home builders in Yorkshire, crafting quality new build homes for modern home buyers. They have been working with us for a number of years now, starting with just a digital marketing retainer in the beginning and then evolving into website design and development work as well. Most recently they have decided to re-brand, introducing a new logo and colour palette, challenging us to successfully apply this new brand across all of their online collateral, from the website to their display ads and everything in-between.

What we did


We ran with the new Chartford brand digitally, successfully creating a brand-new website with complementary marketing assets.

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New designs for a new brand


Armed with Chartford’s new logo and new brand guidelines, we decided to devise some new page designs to go with it, introducing a new main navigation and a more diverse set of page templates. As well as considering how the brand would translate onto the website, we also carefully considered how the brand could be applied to other marketing assets as well, to ensure the end design delivered uniformity across all forms of media. This was to ensure a seamless and professional experience for Chartford customers, at all stages in their buying journey.

 
Chartford Website on Mobile - Pixelbuilders

SEO friendly development


Having already spent a number of months improving Chartford’s visibility on search engines, it was important the new website advanced those efforts even further, building SEO in from the foundations rather that applying SEO principles over the top so to speak. To do that we build the website using HTML5 elements throughout and developments page templates and widgets to allow SEO conscious editing. The latest Google-approved file bundling, compressing CSS and JS into single files before being served to the use, was also implemented to give PageSpeed a significant boost. On top of that we also choose to use last loading for off-screen images by utilising JavaScript Intersection Observers.
Chartford Website Screenshot & Plectrum - Pixelbuilders

Integrating with Rightmove and Zoopla


One tricky part of this build was ensuring we maintained (and where possible improved) the website’s existing integrations with Rightmove and Zoopla, two key routes to market for Chartford Homes. This meant considering how legacy functionality from the old site would fit in with the new one, without compromising the integrations themselves or the usability of the website CMS. To do this we swapped the pages used to pass key information into the Rightmove/Zoopla feed.  Now, content is pulled from individual plot pages instead of house type pages. This ensures each individual property can be listed on the property portals as opposed to fewer, more generalised listings for a collection of plots within a house type. 
Chartford Website Screenshot on Mobile - Pixelbuilders