THE CLIENT

Antique Homes Magazine is an online marketplace and print magazine for real estate professionals and historic homeowners seeking to advertise their property listings and buy antique, historic, or older homes. Starting out as a print publication serving over 30,000 readers in the heart of New England, Antique Homes Magazine has since expanded to become a robust online directory, a “products and services” directory, a virtual “reading room,” and a historic home style guide detailing eras from Early American Colonialism to Modernism.

THE CHALLENGE

As a small husband-and-wife team with one webmaster handling all ad submissions, John and Ginger Petraglia connected with eCity seeking website redesign and development services. With their keen eye for design, they knew exactly what they wanted. John and Ginger sought to create a better user experience to truly showcase the grandeur of their various property listings. However, stuck with a clunky backend, unruly links, and web pages that lacked search engine optimization, their current website wasn’t helping.

The Antique Homes team needed better UI design to more accurately portray the beauty of their properties with greater white space, better organization, and a particular color palette communicating their desired aesthetic. They also needed a smoother content management system, better search engine optimization, a responsive website design, and clearer navigation to improve the overall user experience of their site.

THE PROCESS

Keeping Antique Homes’ audiences of home buyers and sellers at the forefront, we conducted in depth research. We also interviewed stakeholders to better understand the Antique Homes brand and bring their desires and goals to fruition.

Next, we created wireframes to define the architecture of the new site. We migrated all content off of Mystyc, their old content management system, and on to WordPress to provide a smoother backend. Transitioning to WordPress would also provide the Antique Homes team with full customizability as well as easy maintenance moving forward. eCity redesigned the new site in-house, partnering with Teravision for the development phase.

“eCity managed our website design project with commitment, reliable attention to detail and consistently outstanding responsiveness. It was clear to us, at Antique Homes Magazine, that eCity was vested in our project. They did a great job at follow through and our project manager was par excellence.”

THE RESULT

The new site includes the functionality to enable Antique Homes to communicate effectively to their buyers, sellers, advertisers and stakeholders. With their new, flexible content management system, John and Ginger can now easily update their content, and the improved user interface design now presents the inviting aesthetic that is characteristic of Antique Homes. The new site is also now fully optimized for search engines, responsive across all devices, and clearer to navigate―resulting in a better user experience for homeowners and sellers living and loving the antique lifestyle.