Designing Website Architecture for Conversions
In our last blog, Apartment Website Design 101: Resident Personas, we wrote about the differences between resident personalities and resident profiles. Your resident personalities and profiles will play a crucial role in every aspect of your website design and ongoing marketing efforts. This is why you should develop them first.
Now that your profiles have been developed, the next step in designing your apartment website is building a strong site architecture, or structure. In this article, we’ll be breaking down how the personalities and profiles will be used in designing your site architecture.
What is Site Architecture?
Much like constructing an apartment community, the architecture of your website is the framing. The framing of an apartment building includes support and load-bearing walls. In the same way, the architecture of your website will include support pages and load-bearing pages.
Using Resident Profiles
While the marketing agency will recommend website pages that should be included in your site architecture, the resident profiles will dictate the types of support pages, based on the information the resident will be looking for on the site. For example, if your resident profile is a 55+ retiree, then the site should include demand generation pages that highlight things the resident would be interested in, such as:
- Proximity to local hospitals and clinics,
- Local senior centers,
- Location on public transit routes, or
- Community activities
Using Resident Personas
Resident personas come into play for this stage as consideration must be taken for the way each persona type interacts and make decisions on the internet. The pages created based on the persona types are also considered support pages. Examples of these pages could include:
- About page where the property details can be included:
- Management team information,
- Mission statement,
- Vision statement, and
- Value statement/unique value proposition
- Frequently Asked Questions page providing answers to all the most commonly asked questions about the property:
- Tours,
- COVID-19 office procedures,
- Leasing fees,
- Leasing process,
- Rent payment information, and
- Insurance requirements
Search Engines & Site Architecture
Your marketing agency partner should include page recommendations for your site architecture from SEO keyword research. These pages will be considered the site’s load-bearing pages, as they will be the ones that have the most opportunity for keyword optimization and discovery on searches.
When designing your new website, it’s important to remember that while the typical resident sales funnel of one property may be similar to another’s, your property has a unique value proposition of your own. Your apartment community website won’t have the same site architecture as another. The multifamily residential industry shouldn’t focus on a one-size-fits-all solution, because your community is as unique as your residents. Contact the Apeiros Marketing team to learn more about site architecture and how we can consult with you on your website design.
