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Live2024Web

Hillcroft Homes — Real Estate Platform

Marketing site and property showcase for a home-builder, designed to turn casual visitors into qualified leads.

Visit live site

Period

2024

My role

Full-Stack Developer

Team

Solo + design partner

Client

Hillcroft Homes

The Problem

Why this needed to exist.

Most home-builder websites are catalog-style and slow — heavy galleries, weak filtering, and no clear path from browsing to booking a tour. Hillcroft needed a modern marketing presence that ranked well, loaded fast on mobile, and surfaced the right floor plan to the right buyer in under a minute.

The Approach

How I solved it.

Designed a Next.js marketing site with image-optimized property listings, community pages, and a focused lead-capture flow. Content is structured so SEO, performance, and the buyer's mental model all line up — from community browse to floor-plan detail to schedule-a-tour.

Personas

Who I designed for.

Each persona shaped a specific surface of the product. Goals and pain points were validated through interviews and shadowing.

FB

Priya

First-time Home Buyer

Goals

  • Compare communities and floor plans in one place
  • See real prices and availability up front
  • Schedule a tour without phone tag

Pain Points

  • Sites bury pricing behind contact forms
  • Slow image-heavy galleries on mobile
  • Hard to tell what's actually available now
RB

James

Relocating Family Buyer

Goals

  • Filter by school district and commute
  • Understand neighborhood amenities
  • Get pre-qualification next steps clearly

Pain Points

  • Information scattered across PDFs
  • No clear move-in timelines
  • Generic content not tailored to relocation
SM

Maya

Sales & Marketing Lead

Goals

  • Capture qualified leads with full context
  • Update inventory without engineering help
  • Track which communities convert

Pain Points

  • CMS edits required developer time
  • Leads arrived without buyer context
  • No visibility into page performance

Use Cases

Key user flows.

The most critical scenarios the product is designed to make effortless.

01

Buyer

Discover the right community

  1. 1Land on home page or campaign URL
  2. 2Filter communities by location, price, and home type
  3. 3Open a community page with map, amenities, plans
  4. 4Shortlist favorites for later
02

Buyer

Explore a floor plan

  1. 1Open floor plan with bed/bath/sqft and pricing
  2. 2Browse interior photos and virtual walkthrough
  3. 3Check available quick-move-in homes
  4. 4Trigger 'Schedule a tour' or 'Get info' CTA
03

Buyer

Submit a qualified inquiry

  1. 1Open the lead form pre-filled with context
  2. 2Pick preferred tour date or 'just info'
  3. 3Submit; receive confirmation + next steps
  4. 4Sales team gets a notification with full context

UX Process

How I got from problem to product.

The end-to-end design process — from research to ship.

  1. 01

    Audit & Benchmarking

    Reviewed 8 home-builder sites for IA, conversion patterns, and performance to define a faster, clearer baseline.

  2. 02

    Information Architecture

    Modeled the entity hierarchy — Community → Floor Plan → Quick Move-In Home — so navigation matched how buyers actually shop.

  3. 03

    Wireframes & Prototypes

    Mobile-first wireframes for the top three flows, validated with prospective buyers and the sales team.

  4. 04

    Visual Design

    Photography-led visual system with restrained typography so listings feel premium without slowing pages down.

  5. 05

    Build & Launch

    Phased launch with analytics from day one; CMS-driven content so the team can ship updates without engineering.

Roadmap

What shipped — and what's next.

Phased rollout, with each phase validating learnings from the last.

  1. Phase 1 — Marketing site MVP

    Shipped

    Q1 2024

    • Home, communities, and floor-plan pages
    • Lead-capture forms with CRM hand-off
    • SEO foundation + structured data

  2. Phase 2 — Inventory & filtering

    Shipped

    Q2 2024

    • Quick-move-in homes inventory
    • Multi-axis filtering (price, beds, location)
    • Image optimization pipeline

  3. Phase 3 — CMS-driven content

    In progress

    Q3 2024

    • Headless CMS for plans and communities
    • Editorial workflow for the marketing team
    • Localized landing pages

  4. Phase 4 — Buyer accounts & saved homes

    Planned

    Q1 2025

    • Account creation and saved favorites
    • Tour scheduling with calendar sync
    • Pre-qualification handoff

Tech Stack

Built with.

Next.jsReactTypeScriptTailwind CSSNode.js

Engineering Challenges

Hard problems worth solving.

  • Photography-heavy pages without sacrificing Core Web Vitals
  • Modeling inventory so quick-move-ins and floor plans both feel first-class
  • Lead routing that gives sales full buyer context without a custom backend

Outcomes

The numbers that matter.

<1.5s

LCP on community pages (mobile 4G)

Live

In production at hillcrofthomes.com

SEO-ready

Structured data + sitemap shipped on day one

CMS

Marketing team self-serves content updates

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