New homes and thriving communities in Lambeth
Established in 2017, Homes for Lambeth is housing delivery company wholly owned by Lambeth Council. Their purpose is to provide high-quality homes for local people that are safe and sustainable, with a focus on homes at council level rent.
THE BRIEF:
We were approached by Homes for Lambeth as they had just had their 2 sites rebuilt (with a new design) by another agency in a CMS that did not deliver what they wanted. They wanted to move to an open source CMS, and as they were familiar with Umbraco from before they were keen to use this.
It was agreed that we would simply rebuild the 2 sites (Corporate site and the Additions site) exactly the way they were as quickly as possible in Umbraco CMS.
THE PROJECT:
As soon as the websites were relaunched in Umbraco CMS, we started working on improvements and upgrades to the sites.
The client wasn’t happy with how the other agency had designed some of the key pages, in particular the housing development pages, as they were sparsely populated and very inflexible.
They wanted something quite bold and striking and our design studio initially came up with 3 different design concepts, and these were then taken forward into a signed off design.
They wanted these pages to serve more as a hub where visitors would easily be able to find everything related to the development in one area, for example News, events, supporting documents, development plans etc.
Another important part of the project was to improve and streamline internal processes to make them more efficient and save time for the content editors.
To this end, we are building integrations with Eventbrite and Mailchimp, so that content editors only need to add content in one place and then they will automatically be synced and populated on the website.
A better structure for the content is another area that we have worked on as part of the project.
They wanted to move to an open source CMS, and as they were familiar with Umbraco from before they were keen to use this.
"THE RESULT:
The new design is being rolled out to one development, Central Hill, to begin with. After that the client will be able to migrate all their developments to the new setup.
As a hosting and support client, we are working closely with the client to plan in iterations of continuous improvements as there is a long list of upgrade ideas for the future.
