Zacaria

Bucharest, RO · 2019

Real estate and property listing website for Zacaria's "American Village" residential project. Minimalist and elegant website design for a full-service industrial real-estate developer's residential villa neighbourhood in Bucharest.

01CONTEXT

American Village is a luxury residential neighbourhood project designed and developed by the team at Zacaria. This was not Zacaria's first attempt at building its complex website. A previous partner developed a version that didn't deliver on the set expectations.

The team at Zacaria was searching for a professional design and development company that could translate their American Village vision into an international website that would help boost sales for the residential project.

02ambition

The main objective was to transition from their old website to a clean, intuitive platform to showcase their properties, that would act as a conversion funnel for their sales team.

We also needed a solid, memorable brand for the residential complex, that would be flexible to build a great range of marketing materials, from landing pages, websites and online ads to huge street banners, print materials and branded items.

03Challenge

Coming in to clean up after a failed project is always challenging. The project has a baggage of unfulfilled expectations, communication failures and a certain level of frustration generated by the previous partner.

We wanted a clean slate. Therefore we focused on good communication and accurate estimations. We made sure we understood what was asked from us, and delivered on time. Once the initial transition period was over, the collaboration with their marketing became intense and very enjoyable.

04Experience

The American Village website experience was focused on the search and property listing. We designed a clean listing interface, free of overly complex filters and multiple steps to reach the destination. We completed the experience by framing the most important aspects of a property within the design system we created, while using generous amounts of white space for features and visuals fixation.

03Challenge

The requirements for a real estate brand are high, mostly due to the saturation of the market experienced in the last years, by quite a few big players featuring innovative digital solutions for real estate developers.

In order to create a vibrant real estate brand we started with the basics: what does it mean: "To have a roof over your head"? What's a house without a good roof? A roof is a symbol for security, a place we call home and for higher aspirations. So, we based our branding on this common symbol, making it at the same time vibrant and unique.

06Technology

The primary goal of the website was to convert and be easily integrated with various content marketing tools to help us boost sales. We also needed it to be flexible so that we could quickly change it as we collected visitor feedback from early interactions.

06front-end

We used our custom build system (you can check it out here: https://graffino.ninja) built on Webpack to build the frontend. SCSS for CSS, accessible ARIA HTML5 and vanilla ES7 JS (JavaScript) was used to complete the frontend.

The most noticeable feature was the Google Maps advanced search, filtering and availability display for the listings. We used this to drive user interaction and conversions.

07back-end

WordPress continues to be a solid, go-to solution for small to medium content-driven websites. We built, from the ground up, a custom theme, featuring custom widgets, custom Gutenberg blocks, advanced settings and custom API integrations. This allowed the client to use a familiar interface, and to automate listings in the backend.

08outcomes

They were honest, professional, and highly responsive. They went above and beyond to make the product as good as possible.

G. Cibu