Two Websites. Two Audiences. One CMS.
The Challenge
Bal Harbour Village, an upscale neighborhood at the Northern tip of Miami Beach, needed to refresh their web presence. The Village required two distinct websites—both of which needed to share a cohesive look and feel, an intuitive UI, and a single content management system for ease of updating. Each site, however, would serve a very distinct audience and purpose: a Tourism site to showcase the unique beauty, premium shopping, and luxury amenities of the Village; and a year-round Residents site where locals could do everything from learning about municipal happenings to paying their water bill.
The Insight
Following immersive stakeholder interviews, research, persona creation, and a competitive audit, our team understood the essentials: both sites had to reflect the brand and character of Bal Harbour—elegant and welcoming—while engaging their respective audiences in very different ways. The Tourism site would lead with stylish video, photography, and engaging copy that brought the destination to life. In contrast, the Resident site needed to be highly functional, facilitating transactions and navigation with multiple avenues and to help a resident find what they need. (Not only would this make for a better user experience: allowing more tasks to be done seamlessly online would reduce time-consuming calls to Village staff.)
The Solution
We redesigned and developed the sites in a WordPress Multisite environment, which allowed the sites to live on separate domains while still sharing some functionality “under one roof” in the CMS. Both sites now offer a refreshed and intuitive navigation and IA, presented within a custom mega menu. On the Residents site, we located links to heavily sought-after content within an “I Want To” menu, elevating material that was previously buried within Department-specific subpages. And each site now maintains the same tasteful, simple aesthetic and design system—reinforcing the Bal Harbour Village brand, across every web-based touchpoint.
