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

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 The site’s outdated visual design, lack of mobile responsiveness, and limited search engine visibility were working against the company in a crowded home-building market.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The site’s outdated visual design, lack of mobile responsiveness, and limited search engine visibility were working against the company in a crowded home-building market.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

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.

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.