Customer user experience for custom home builder: Website redesign expands reach for Drees Homes

Challenge

With a strong demand for custom homes in today’s housing market, many buyers begin their search for a new home online. Homebuilders must be visible to potential buyers and have meaningful information readily available. An updated, engaging online experience is part of the ticket to visibility that all builders need.

While Drees Homes relied heavily on its website to drive customer leads and showcase its homes, the builder recognized the need to update its website to stay competitive in the digital landscape. The site’s outdated visual design, lack of mobile responsiveness, and limited search engine visibility were working against the company in a crowded home-building market.

Additionally, maintaining the site was highly inefficient. The marketing department was dependent upon limited IT staff to make content updates and they were not utilizing best practices for capturing site data. The site was not search-engine-optimized, and the builder needed to better understand its customers’ needs.

The site’s outdated visual design, lack of mobile responsiveness, and limited search engine visibility were working against the company in a crowded home-building market.

Ready for a change, Drees Homes turned to Fusion for strategic, technical, and creative expertise to help take their website to the next level.

Solution

In order to recommend features, tools, and functionality for their new site, we worked with Drees to conduct customer and stakeholder interviews and online surveys to better understand the current pain points and needs.

Design example of Drees Home website redesign

Based on that feedback, we created a roadmap for the website redesign and got started. The result was a website that would help them reach their customers more effectively, and included:

A streamlined site structure better suited to drive users through the custom home buying process
A user-centered approach to the home search utility emphasizing the pathways most likely taken by the majority of visitors
More opportunities for visitors to make contact with Drees sales representatives
New, rich content to increase search engine visibility
Deeper level listing pages that are focused on users searching for new homes in specific geographies
New look and feel incorporating the latest design trends
Mobile-responsive design
Consistency in messaging – continuously communicating the brand identity, voice, and value on every page
New feature that allows customers to compare different homes
SEO friendly town pages (only accessed through search to help in search rankings)

Fusion also implemented a measurement framework so that Drees Homes would have the ability to measure site performance through Google Analytics to enable ongoing optimization and improvement.

Outcomes

With its new content, features, and functionality based on user research, as well as a modern, on-trend design, the Drees website more effectively conveys the quality and service that Drees is known for. Their website is comprehensive and usable and allows potential customers to move forward with their buying journey both at a computer or on a mobile device. And with newfound search engine visibility, more traffic is being driven to their website.

Additionally, Drees now has access to actionable analytics data. This data will allow them to better understand their customers and their buying journeys, and customize experiences that will tailor to their specific needs.

In today’s digital climate, every company has a website. But having the right website is what makes all the difference to your customers and ultimately to your bottom line.