Views Website Rebuild and CMS Overhaul
Views is a Manchester property developer doing genuinely interesting work by turning neglected spaces into places people actually want to live. Their clean and confident brand style reflected their ethos perfectly, however, their existing CMS was built on a system of custom Gutenberg blocks with clunky functionality that didn’t allow the business to keep their website up-to-date.
Even straightforward updates needed a developer, and for a small team managing an active project portfolio, it was a real drain on time, budget, and patience.
We dug into the data before touching the design
Before any talk of solutions, we went through the site properly, looking into performance, SEO, and user experience.
The homepage took 3.9 seconds to load and scored 42% on performance, while the Projects page was effectively broken, trust signals were missing across the board and CTAs were sparse.
However, there was genuine potential, but the technical foundations were getting in the way.
A rebuild, not a patch
The temptation with a site like this is to fix the obvious things, but we made the case for going further.
The site had accumulated a lot of small inconsistencies that were quietly undermining the brand, so rather than a full redesign it was about consistency, good UX and a proper rebuild using Advanced Custom Fields and custom templates, replacing the old system entirely.
Views were up for it and so the brief became to make it easy to manage, make it consistent, make it fast, and make it work harder commercially.
As part of that, we developed a full design system to bring consistency to the site's styles, hover states, and component behaviour and gave the team a solid foundation to build from.
Creating a project lifecycle system
This was the most involved part of the build.
A Views development can pass through seven stages and each one needs to surface different content, but the old site required manual intervention every time a project moved forward. So we built a system where the right modules appear automatically based on the project's current stage, all controlled from the CMS and no developer required every time a project stage changed, including the ability to assign colours to project stages and icons.
Faster, cleaner and easier to find
Performance improvements were built in from the start, including a rebuilt Google Maps integration that actually works.
The team at Views can now update the site themselves easily, and be confident that it's going to look great, which makes a real it real difference for business moving at the pace Views are.
Our tried and tested approach ensures that our clients connect with the right audience.
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