Big Changes for bhgrealestate.com

Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate in the US has rolled out some big changes for their website, bhgrealestate.com.

In a blog post announcing the improvements, which include a new homepage with prominent search function, masses of video and a luxury program, the company said they had four objectives in the redesign:

1. Reduce branding space and make property search more prominent to drive more traffic to our affiliates.
2. Provide flexibility to more easily merchandise video and written content.
3. Highlight our new video platform and Premier Selection program.
4. Provide as much of the assets for the enhancements to our affiliates.

In the blog post, Jason Steele gives some valuable insights into the thinking behind the changes and the process of developing a website as large as bhgrealestate.com:

“The prep work actually began on July 24th 2008, the day after we launched publicly at Real Estate Connect in San Francisco. Anyone who has ever built a web site with a fixed deadline and budget knows lots of features and functions fall off the cart as launch day approaches. Those features and usability tweaks became the foundation for today’s redesign. As September (2008) approached, we felt it was imperative to get some outside consumer perspective, as it is easy to overlook obvious flaws internally staring at the site for almost 6 straight months. You can check out some of the findings in a post entitled “Building a consumer site in a vacuum,” I wrote earlier this year. Lastly, we have been working on growing our editorial strategy from both a written and video perspective so we needed a better delivery/merchandising mechanism. That’s how any sound web development project should start, with a list of requirements and clearly defined objectives.”

Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate are a finalist in the most innovative brokerage or franchise category of the 2009 Inman News Innovator Awards and its bhgrealestate.com website was a 2009 Webby Award nominee.

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