Forty Ninth Living is a rental real estate business in Chilliwack, BC, and the company’s website is the work of Khula Studio, a branding design studio from Canada.
Forty Ninth Living’s founder, Kristie Derkson, originally built multiple websites and came up with logos for every single property in her listing. This proved too time-consuming and costly because of all the different domain and hosting expenses.
The challenge the web design agency faced was to create a unified online presence for all of the company’s properties. The company needed to craft a professional brand identity that resonated with Forty Ninth Living’s target audience and accurately reflected the business.
Following the website strategy and audience discovery research, the studio created an on-brand visual identity and a single-platform website that is able to provide updated information in real-time.
Now, the site’s powerful new Content Management System is capable of handling dynamic content across the website and empowering the seamless adding of new real estate units.
Not only has the new Forty Ninth Living website design improved the user experience, it also revolutionized the company’s workflow and daily processes.
Forty Ninth Living’s website isn’t overly “large” to navigate, in the sense that once a user lands on the home page, they don’t need to scroll too far to get to the bottom.
Looking for a real estate property can be an overwhelming experience. Khula Studio, well aware of this, simplified the website navigation by implementing a sticky main menu, which contains only a handful of key user journey points.
Call-to-actions are scattered throughout the home page, beginning with the one above the fold that invites visitors to find their unit. They drive visitors to different stages of the conversion funnel.
An especially convenient touch is the use of email, phone call and calendar CTA buttons at the side of every property's module. These elements help booking an interview or calling via Skype or phone remarkably fast and simple.
Messaging and information availability are essential elements of any website. Forty Ninth Living website design employs succinct copy, brief paragraphs and plenty of bullet points to emphasize key selling points.
The “Find Your Unit” page is the website's centerpiece. This is where all the apartments, suites, townhomes and family homes are listed.
On the left-hand side of the page, the option to filter by housing type, the number of bedrooms and bathrooms, price range and more helps the user narrow down the housing options according to his budget and desires.
To the right of the page, the real estate units are listed in a three-column layout. Clicking on a photo takes the visitor to the home page containing hi-res images of the interior and exterior, plus floorplans and other vital info.
This real estate website ticks all the boxes when it comes to legibility and navigation best practices. The result is a very enjoyable user journey that delivers vital information at the right time.
In addition to designing the website, Khula Studio also developed a full brand identity for Forty Ninth Living, including the logo, color palette, typeface and brand book.
The concise design that uses an occasional video as the website backdrop also has a color scheme that lends a feel of modernity and exclusivity to the real estate business.
The website’s color palette consists of six distinct shades: light to dark grey hues with some blue undertones (ranging from #D5DCE0 to #6B7C81) and a salmon pink (#C28285) that is used as the accent color for CTAs.
Two different fonts are present in different copy sections: a stylish Baskerville serif font for titles and headings and a Bebas Neue sans-serif font for major portions of text and buttons.
On any smartphone or tablet device, Forty Ninth Living’s “Find Your Unit” page transforms to a one-column and two-column layout, respectively. The highly responsive nature of the website’s mobile version makes it easy to navigate on smaller screens.
Even though the main navigation is hidden in the top right corner as a hamburger menu, CTAs take the main stage on the mobile iteration of this website.
The contrasting color makes their “popping” effect even more apparent on smartphones, where they take up a significant portion of the screen. This makes them easy to tap with a thumb, leading the user to the conversion point.
Khula Studio has managed to create a unified website presence for Forty Ninth Living, proving that one well-designed and user-friendly website is worth much more than a bevy of individual, sun-par ones.
After all, the post-launch ROI figures prove this: the website’s overall performance score rose by 46%, while the SEO score got an 11% boost.
Forty Ninth Living website design is a prime example of what happens when brand strategy, brand identity, information architecture, UX/UI design and web development seamlessly come together.
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