Sector(s)
Childress Klein is one of the largest full-service real estate companies in the Southeast US. And while the firm has developed over 50 million square feet of commercial real estate across a variety of sectors, Childress Klein is at heart a family and employee-friendly company. In moving ahead with a site redesign, a primary goal was to better tell the story of a company with vast market expertise that also has a deep commitment to their employees.
About the project
The Challenge
The old site didn't properly display the depth and breadth of their expertise, the high quality of their projects, and the people that are essential to the company's success. The underlying technology, poor site performance (pages took forever to load!), and dated design were a constant source of frustration; add to that a navigation structure that led to many digital 'cul de sacs'. It was time to reimagine the site's content types and backend administration to make it easier for a small, focused team to manage content.
The Chapter Three Solution
After careful on-site discovery with the client team, our solution centered on three pillars: people, project expertise, and properties. The company's leadership made clear that their people were the heart and soul of the company; they saw employees as family. You could sense that inside the building but not on the website. We made sure to connect people to projects, both as related content, and in our guidance on imagery and look and feel.
We developed a design that allowed for big, bold images, made sure real employees were featured throughout the site, created a vastly improved interface for property searches and simplified the navigation structure by housing their services and property types under a single navigation point called "capabilities". There are now 4 primary entry points plus a separate "Careers" section to emphasize the value of employees to the company. People first drives the website.
Why Drupal was chosen
The previous website had grown unwieldy and inflexible; the CMS was a hindrance to making improvements. Our strategy involved creating new relationships between content types and using a variety of modules to form a better way to 'glue' the various elements of firm expertise, news, people and properties together.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
