Portfolio: Battersea Flats

Lanigan Estates offers property-letting services, providing marketing and management services for Landlords via their website, www.batterseaflats.com.

The company had a significant opportunity to enhance their portfolio with the addition of 12 premium apartments, however, the quality of the website did not match the quality or service level that would be expected by association with these new properties.

Project Brief

Lanigan Estates approached Bluesulphur and Compsoft with a brief to provide a website design that demonstrated the professional yet personal service offered by the company and the quality of the advertised properties. The company needed a website that would scale easily with the business, being able to add new properties and reintroduce properties returning to market with descriptions, photos and location details.

Response

The Battersea Flats website and branding were designed with a scalable business plan in mind. The screen layout and banner space had to be flexible enough to cross over onto future websites in Lanigan Estates' stable. The Lanigan concept of a franchise style company meant they needed a website design concept that could be tweaked to efficiently create variations for their partners.

The website required a complex Content Management System (CMS). Using Compsoft's code library, a CMS was developed that enabled page creation, text editing and image upload and automatic resizing. Additionally, to enhance the customer experience when searching for properties, developers took the Google Maps' API and added new functionality. Typically, an embedded map on a website will show the location of a postcode with the ability to zoom in and out. However, the Bluesulphur website development team wanted greater accuracy; by linking the Google Map to latitude and longitude references, the administrator can drag and drop a marker directly over the premises for absolute accuracy.

Development and testing verified that the website was compatible with the major browsers - Mozilla, Internet Explorer version 7 and Safari. With some 20 per cent of internet users still using the troubled IE 6, effort was taken to ensure that the pages would render as expected.

The resulting website is now live at www.batterseaflats.com. Its owner, Lanigan Estates, is looking at growing its business through a more professional website design that offers customers a better experience, more indicative of the quality that Lanigan Estates stands for.