Red Brick is a St. Louis-based property management company that owns many-a-square-foot in cool, old (but renovated) buildings in St. Louis’ most popular neighborhoods. The locally renowned company has been around for more than 40 years, so we were honored when they approached us about building a robust website.
Tasks were many on this project, and it proved to be a great challenge for Gorilla. Not only did we have to overhaul the look of their existing site but we had to move a massive database of hundreds of rental properties and present them in an organized manner for a more user friendly experience. We focused on specific calls-to-action all throughout the site to control a user’s on-site experience.
Additionally, best search optimization practices were very important so we had to pay particularly close attention to page titles, URLs, headlines and site copy.
Organizing a massive database of properties
Red Brick has hundreds of properties spanning multiple St. Louis neighborhoods and they include both commercial spaces and residential spaces. A refinement of search and filters was at the heart of this site’s reorganization and it had to be easy for Red Brick to manage internally.
Focus on specific calls-to-action
Red Brick wanted to focus on their unique form of open houses (in short, self-led tours), so strategically placed calls-to-action throughout the site drive visitors to a page that explains this unique process. Users then have the ability to flag properties of interest and download a print-friendly PDF property sheet to make their physical apartment search even easier.
Existing customer service
From the initial briefing, we knew we had to make it easy for existing tenants to put in maintenance requests, find information they needed, and generally speaking, navigate the site. So, we did. The result is a site and experience that is a win-win for both the tenant and Red Brick as making a request, managing a request and documenting a request are a breeze.
Search engine optimization
To satisfy the search side of things, we focused on using keywords like “st. louis apartments” and the names of the neighborhoods in the the URLs, page titles and headlines throughout the site. Though the new site is relatively young, we’ve already seen major improvements.
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