Website Redesign

High Five Properties

High Five Properties LLC needed a fast and reliable UI for both its admin and users, and the website needed to reflect the bubbly attitude of its owners and personable quality of the brand. This website design mixes a clean and friendly environment with bright splashes of colors in order to capture the professional nature of the company and the exuberance of the Portland community. The design of the site is neat and places importance more on the homes being sold and rented, but still uses the creative artwork and colors of Tim Root (the artist of choice for High Five Properties) which makes the experience playful and memorable. By making some smart changes in UI, theme and CMS research, AI and client feedback a strong new brand and website have emerged for High Five Properties that reflects who they are in essence.

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Design Ideation

The main objective of this site was to make shopping for a new home enjoyable. Lisa, High Five Properties owner, has been thinking about her site for a while and gave pretty clear expectations of her design expectations as well as what she wanted the site to accomplish for its users. I began the process of mapping out the key parts of the site by taking in the owner’s needs, looking at other similar sites and also by discussing website experiences with recent home buyers and people who were currently looking for an apartment to create an informal user journey map.

Site Architecture

Site Map and Wireframes

The site architecture for this site was pretty straight forward after researching similar sites and really looking at what the business and consumer needed. The site needed to convey trust and an established practice without seeming to be overly stuffy. To quote the business owner “I don’t want it to look or feel corporate.” Users wanted to be able to search for specific properties using filters, contact the business and download an application contact form. The site map, pictured above, laid out how to use the business’s then current information and showed future plans to expand the site to do more for both the business owner and front-end users. The wireframes give a preview of placement of sections on the site and showed how things would link up according to the site map.

Visual Design

High Five Properties came with a wealth of home images and original artwork by Tim Root, local artist, however they seemed to not flow together. The first challenge of the project was to incorporate the feel of the artwork into the brand of the business. During the branding of High Five Properties logo, type, color scheme, etc.f were set up. The elements were then incorporated into the front-end of the site’s user interface.