Lennar LMC
Highlights
The team wanted a platform that would unify all of its community sites under a single hosting and management platform.
The company’s previous sites were not user-friendly to consumers or content creators.
Drupal CMS, Acquia Site Factory, Acquia Site Studio, Acquia DAM
Lennar is now able to quickly spin up new sites for their communities without the aid of a developer, reducing their time-to-live process from many months or weeks to a week or less.
The Client
Launched in 2011 by Lennar, LMC is a multifamily real estate development and operating company that has quickly grown to be among the nation’s most active developers. The company builds innovative, quality high-rise, mid-rise and garden apartment communities across the U.S.
The Situation
The LMC team wanted to design and implement a platform that would unify all of its community websites under a single hosting and management platform, providing their content marketers with modern, user-friendly web authoring tools. They also wanted to create more consistency in structure, wayfinding and branding among community sites, while still allowing for flexibility. Additionally, they wanted a platform that would allow them to import community data, rooms and floor plans and allow extra metadata to enhance users’ ability to search.
The Challenge
LMC’s previous sites were designed and built by numerous agency partners using different hosting solutions, leading to inconsistent experiences for users. Creating and managing new sites required the assistance of the agency partner, and time to market was slow, as sites had to be built from scratch each time a new community launched.
The Solution
Partner Velir took the lead, conducting a thorough analysis of existing web properties and creating wireframes to define key pages and a set of flexible components required to roll out community sites. From there, designers and developers began prototyping collaboratively to determine the best use of out-of-the-box Site Studio components paired with custom components needed to add functionality to the new Drupal site experience. After defining all components, the teams worked together to develop three unique web templates that allowed design variation as new community sites were spun up.
In addition to template development, Velir worked with LMC to create a theme framework for the branded site experiences. Based on a comprehensive branding review, Velir developed three distinct design themes based on property type, market and style, which allowed content creators to easily swap out key brand elements to deliver new and unique community websites on the fly. This approach simplified the process so that content creators can select a designated community from a drop-down menu without requiring any external help or technical ability to make it work.
The Results
Lennar is now able to quickly spin up new sites for their communities without the aid of a developer, reducing their time-to-live process from many months or weeks to a week or less. With minimal effort, anyone at the Lennar organization can create a new site, import property and floor plan data from third-party services, set up analytics, and build out a full working site in just a day. Now, the least technical person on the team is as capable as the most technical person on the team.