Boris Mannsfeld & Associates

About the Project

Having established themselves as one of the premier real estate companies in Belize and the Caribbean, Boris Mannsfeld and Associates (BMA) felt that their old website simply wasn’t keeping up with their image or the demands of their growing empire. The company required a faster and more feature rich system that was tailored more specifically to their needs.

Project Objectives:

• Develop an attractive new website with an overall modern aesthetic and improved user experience with an emphasis on speed in load times.
• Adhere to company branding style guidelines while developing a design language with an emphasis on portraying the company as fun, familial, and with rich with imagery of Placencia.
• Give users multiple avenues from which to browse the company’s property catalog.
• Implement a “wow factor” feature that would distinguish BMA from other real estate agencies in the region.
• Drive conversion of site visitors into contacts and ultimately customers.
• Implement simple but powerful search functionalities to make it easy for customers to find what they are looking for.
• Establish SEO foundations to increase search engine traffic and drive future growth.
• Develop an efficient and easy to use backend solution for managing the website.

Phase 1 – Prototyping

BMA made it very clear early on that the website must be fast. Since real estate websites revolves entirely around property catalogs which are information rich and loaded with photos, we made sure to consider the overall design and the underlying technologies we’d use when planning and designing the website. We decided to implement Angular as it renders components and modules only when they are needed on a webpage, making for super-fast load times. This decision also influenced which component types we adapted into our designs, especially since we’d be required to offer users several browsing options for the properties. We then went ahead and organized the menu and homepage by these different browsing options which included viewing properties by property types, by location via a map search, a separate area just for Islands, and by communities. While the final design is slightly different you can see from very early on that we had already settled on the final design layout.

Phase 3 – Refine & Launch

In the final phases of the project, we did extensive testing to make sure the search functionalities and cataloguing of the properties across the different components were working and loading visually as intended. We also beta tested the website to select stakeholders in the industry to gain feedback on overall navigation and utility of the website. We also conducted trails with listing managers at BMA to ensure the effectiveness of the backend application to manage the website. Lastly, for the “wow factor” feature requested by BMA, we developed a 360 interactive virtual tour of the entire Placencia, Peninsula so that foreign investors can immerse themselves and learn more about the areas they’d like to purchase in. The virtual tour also allows BMA agents to connect online together with clients in real time and give a tour of the visually stunning Placencia, Peninsula. This is especially useful for BMA since many of their clients have never been to Belize before, and for those that have, it allows a different perspective and level of exploration of the Peninsula. We made sure to highlight the tour in as many places as possible across the website to ensure that users won’t miss out on this unique feature. Boris Mannsfeld and Associates is now equipped with a dynamic website that embodies and highlights their company philosophy and culture and all the tools necessary to generate more leads and to continue expanding their market share locally and internationally.