In an earlier post, I discussed redesigning your website and its timing. In short, the focus you put on building a solid foundation will allow you to make incremental website design changes on an as-needed basis, rather than performing taxing overhauls on a whim. We just recently put that method into practice here on our own site.
While we are focusing on some of the latest new looks on tribus.com, it’s worth noting that one of our biggest strengths we bring to the table for our clients is our nimbleness. Where many real estate brokerage platform vendors provide rigid websites that are either impossible or expensive to make any modifications to over the years, TRIBUS sites can grow and change as you do. Our sites are nothing if not flexible, making iterative, incremental website design changes like these possible. And we love working alongside our clients to make sure their needs are being met long after launch.
Back to tribus.com. To give you some context, our current site is relatively new. We launched in the summer of 2016. Solidifying our brand identity and crafting a steady content strategy has helped put us in a very stable position, design-wise. We’ve been able to implement our brand ideas with a high amount of consistency that reflects our values and the mission we set out to achieve.
Learn About Our New Ads and Leads Program - TRIBUS Engage
But despite hitting benchmarks, you still aspire to be constantly improving. As far as the website is concerned, one of the leading deciders for improvements will be based on the feedback you gather and how it is affecting your users. This is invaluable information that will guide you toward areas that need attention, and in the case I’ll be writing on here, we’ll take a look at our Portfolio and Integrations pages.
A Portfolio is an important part of a group that makes things, especially on the web. It shows the type of work you’re able to do and its quality. Below you’ll see our list of projects, which didn’t seem to represent the quality of which we’re used to.
When you average up all the redesigns in the world, you’ll find motivations for incremental website design changes come from within the company. They’ve either stared at it for too long or they just want to add some detail to it, whereas users like the visual design, but they like learning and getting things done more. In the case of our portfolio, it seemed to be an even mix of both. There wasn’t enough detail for users to be able to learn enough about the quality of our work.
Learn About Our New Ads and Leads Program - TRIBUS Engage
We set out to balance the old approach of showing the brands we’ve worked with, while adding something new and more visually appealing that shows our quality.
Over time, we’ve observed that our Integrations page happened to be one of the most visited sections of our site. And it’s no surprise as you explore a new platform, you’ll want to know if your new tech works with some of your old tech. As you’ll see below, in our initial launch we had a grid with all of our integrations categorized by tags. And if you look in the top right, you’ll find a handy little drop down that will filter the results. You could also filter your results by clicking the tags themselves.
Learn About Our New Ads and Leads Program - TRIBUS Engage
The design fit our needs at the time. “At the time” would be the operative term. Fast forward to 2017 and there are a ton of new integrations and more on the way. Our filtering dropdown wasn’t effective enough for our frequently visited page. The thing with searching archives is that it needs to be obvious. It needs to be immediately apparent what you are looking at and searching for. Users crave familiarity and, as such, our design was lacking.
In an effort to ameliorate these shortcomings, you’ll see below, we’ve made an effort to show you every type of service that can integrate with our platform through incremental website design changes, filtering further by name or date added. If you’re looking for something a bit more specific, there is a type-in search field.
Revolutionary this is not, but it is a clear example of us coming together as a group to identify a need and implement simple, incremental website design changes. It’s shown to significantly impact the effectiveness of a heavily visited page without breaking up the solid foundation we’ve built.
Go ahead and check it out and learn more about our integrations here.
