Work
Woodards
Real Estate
Specialising in residential property sales & management since 1921.
Visit SiteThe Woodards' website plays a critical role in distributing information about property and the market across 14 offices.
This information is often time-critical, so it’s imperative that it not only displays this information in a way that’s easy to digest for users but simple for Woodards to maintain and keep up-to-date.
"After an extensive interview process, we chose Soul+Wolf as our Digital Agency. The team delivered on their promise & created an incredibly attractive & functional site. It was everything that we hoped for."
Cathy Romagnano, General Manager - Woodards
The Goal
Woodards wanted to showcase each of their property listings with quality and distinction.
However, underpinning all of this was the intense functional requirement of aggregating this listing data from 14 different offices (using different listing systems) and then providing end users with an intuitive way to find relevant property-related information.
Furthermore, in order to compete with other major portals such as REA and Domain, the website needed to include a number of other unique features and user-friendly functions to make it easier for property buyers, sellers and renters to find their ideal property.
Developed with cutting-edge Node.js technology, the Woodards' website seamlessly integrates & dynamically loads ubiquitous property listing data from 14 different office locations.
The Solution
By following best practice and industry standards, we developed an intuitive and easy-to-use 'Property Search' tool that enables end users to search and view various properties and save their 'favourites'.
Upon loading the site, it’s evident that ‘Property Search’ is the focal point of the site. It’s not just the form itself that makes this obvious, but the surrounding positive white-space that’s used. In fact, white space (both positive and negative) is a technique that’s used throughout the site to ensure that key information is easily consumed.
The 'Property Search' form accommodates a broad range of very simple and highly complex search requests based on the user’s intent. At first glance, the form is incredibly sleek and only offers the most critical search information in order to return and display relevant property results. Extending this further, the user can very simply request various other property variables to narrow down their results. The use of a 'predictive search' feature also gives the user an ability to narrow down (i.e. find and select) an individual property directly via the search field without needing to load all the results.
This beautiful user experience is not only available on desktop, but most importantly on mobile, where user attention and screen size is relatively limited. The website was designed from the ground up with a mobile-first methodology, the mobile user experience has been at the forefront of every design consideration and direction taken. Accessing the website on any device illustrates this point, but none more so than a mobile web browser which guides the user through searching, shortlisting and enquiring on a property.
The Results
Since the launch of the website, more than 16,000 additional mobile visitors came to the website compared to the previous year. Not only that, but together with our focus on user experience and data optimisation, these users are more engaged and spend more time on the website (overall). Other results also include:
- 64.2% increase in new Visitors;
- 35.8% increase in returning Visitors;
- 4.7% conversion rate;
- 12.8% reduction in Bounce Rate.