The Miller Commercial website was an exciting and challenging project to undertake. They are recognised as the benchmark for buying and letting commercial property in Cornwall, and were recently voted the county’s Most Active Agent for the 8th year running. They add unparalleled experience and knowledge to their sector, with a dedicated team, extensive marketing, and a vast database of highly engaged customers.
Our challenge was to represent this through a new digital presence, raising the bar for the commercial property sector in Cornwall and providing a clear and engaging online experience.
To get to the heart of the project, we partnered closely with the Miller team in a series of discovery workshops. This produced a list of addressable insights that helped us to define the core goals of the website. These included; level of service, friendly and inclusve approach, the mobile user experience, and critically, the tech integrations that would be needed to support the platform.
One of the defining goals of the website was to bring a personal touch to the experience of buying and letting commercial property. To do this we had to bring the members of the Miller Commercial team to the forefront of the website and introduce them visually as key touch points for direct engagement with the user. We arranged and directed a photoshoot, so we could collate the assets in a way that would fit with the design of the website. This helped us to establish key contacts on the site, which carried over to the offline experience, engaging a potential customer with the team, and helped to bring trust and familiarity through digital to physical interaction.
From our initial analysis of the current analytics, it was clear that the majority of visits to the site were from mobile devices. With most users starting their journeys on a mobile, but often continuing them on a desktop or tablet. This made for a challenging user experience design, but one that has seen some real results in execution.
With a clear and carefully considered layout, we were able to maximise the potential for engagement. This was achieved with strong calls to action, an easy to use search and filter function, and the ability to find desired properties with minimum user friction. This has led to some encouraging feedback, and in some instances it’s been described as ‘a joy to use.’
From the tech side we were presented with the challenge of integrating the Vebra Property Software system. The system has the power to list a vast number of properties and businesses, each of which need to be queried and pushed to the website making the display of listings seamlessly integrated. We choose to work with the WordPress system as the CMS is open source and offers the flexibility and customisation when building a bespoke frontend theme. As part of our overall quality and standards check we ensured we adhered to accessibility guidelines, and the website was built to W3C and WCAG compliant standards.
The hard work has recently been validated through the CSS design awards where we received an innovation, design, and UX award as well as special kudos but the real success has been in how effectively it’s performing.
