About the Client

Balfour Beatty Homes, renowned for creating high-quality, modern living spaces with a strong focus on design, operational excellence, and exceptional customer service, specialises in creating homes for all.

In their 110 years of operation, they have built hospitals, roads, schools, airports, and more, acting as key players in the construction and infrastructure industry.

Discovery

To address Balfour Beatty Homes' needs, we undertook a detailed discovery phase to understand the existing website and ensure alignment with the new Umbraco build. This phase involved identifying the necessary updates and improvements needed within the build.

Our key activities included:

Quantitative analysis: Using data from Google Analytics, we analysed user behaviour to understand how people behave on balfourbeatty.com, where they go and where there are opportunities to improve user experience.

User needs analysis: We conducted a user needs analysis to discover what website visitors and CMS users need. This would help us ensure all user requirements are met in the new Umbraco build.

Content audit: We performed user testing, staff surveys, and interviews to evaluate which content was engaging and which was ignored, guiding the content strategy for the new site.

Digital estate analysis: We assessed component requirements across the other sites within the Balfour Beatty estate to ensure we could maintain consistency and integrate smoothly.

Requirement analysis: We defined technical requirements for the estate rebuild and platform, ensuring the new website would be robust and scalable.

Style Tile

We developed a comprehensive style tile with insights gained from the discovery phase, adhering to Balfour Beatty’s brand guidelines. We utilised pre-existing wireframes to ensure efficient and cost-effective development, focusing on key page layouts and components.

The comprehensive style tile detailed all content components to convey how the UX enhancements and Balfour Beatty’s branding updates would be digitally implemented across the website. Additionally, we implemented up to 20 reusable components to power the new experience on balfourbeatty.com and other websites in the estate, ensuring the new brand was applied consistently.

UX and Strategy

Based on insights from the UX and strategy teams, including Google Analytics analysis and tree testing, we recommended enhancements to the sitemap. We rethought and redesigned the website experience to house the new information architecture (IA) and content on balfourbeatty.com and the other websites in the estate, reflecting the brand.

Additionally, we reviewed and finalised the designs for the media centre, ensuring desktop and mobile variants. The media centre was designed as a resource for press, investors, and other interested parties to research the company and access the most recent or valuable content.

Together we worked through an initial design process where we evaluated media centres on competitor and non-competitor sites, drafted an initial set of wireframes, and collected feedback from key stakeholders at Balfour Beatty. The final designs needed to align with Balfour Beatty’s expectations, so we reviewed the designs provided and ensure their workability within Umbraco.

This work ensured, Balfour Beatty had a streamlined and intuitive website that not only reflected their brand values but also provided a superior user experience. This strategic redesign helped in retaining visitors, improving engagement metrics, and ensuring the site could grow and adapt as Balfour Beatty continues to innovate and expand.

Technical implementation and SEO

In terms of technical implementation, we built the new website by integrating new content components into the grid editor for an enhanced CMS user experience. This enabled heavily design-focused page templates to still be fully editable by content managers, allowing for straightforward content updates and an improved editor experience.

Furthermore, we set up Google Analytics (GA) and Google Tag Manager (GTM). By integrating these features we enabled for comprehensive user tracking and analytics. With this information Balfour Beatty could then make data-driven decisions to improve user engagement, optimise marketing strategies, and enhance overall site performance.

We also worked to improve SEO efforts by implementing 301 redirects, creating an XML sitemap, and optimising metadata for each page. These efforts enhanced search engine visibility, ensured smooth transitions for users and search engines when content was moved or updated, and improved overall site indexing and ranking.

Quality Assurance (QA) Testing

All of our projects undergo rigorous testing through the software development process. In order to deliver the utmost quality for clients and their respective uses, our in-house QA team ensures that all end products perform accurately and reliably under normal and abnormal conditions. Testing is followed by continual monitoring of software performance to prevent reoccurrence of any issues and to ensure efficient ongoing operation.

As such, we were able to confidently deliver a well-designed, scalable and technically stable result.

Results

The successful upgrade of Balfour Beatty Homes' website resulted in a modern, user-friendly platform that aligns with their brand and supports operational excellence.

Overall, the project ensured Balfour Beatty Homes could continue to deliver high-quality service and customer satisfaction through an updated digital presence, supporting their goal of creating aspirational living spaces with exceptional operational excellence.

Key results include:

Enhanced User Experience: The new site offered improved navigation, faster load times, and a seamless browsing experience across devices.

Improved CMS Functionality: Content editors benefited from an intuitive and flexible content management system, enabling efficient content updates and management.

Increased Security and Performance: The upgraded platform provided robust security features and better performance, ensuring a stable and reliable website.

SEO and Analytics Optimisation: Implementing 301 redirects, XML sitemaps, and metadata optimisation improved the site’s search engine visibility and user tracking capabilities.

Enhancing UX, CMS functionality, and SEO with a modern Umbraco upgrade

About The Project

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