My final themed build with BigWing also gave me the chance to get back into the real estate and mortgage industry after almost four years in other fields. I had spent 8.5 years previously working for a real estate software firm that developed websites and applications for agents, appraisers, inspectors, and mortgage professionals. I had specialized in the website division both designing and consulting/coaching with our clients to help them get the best results out of our solutions. It was neat to get the opportunity to do another mortgage website and see if I still had the chops.
Their existing website was built by 220 Marketing and they had done almost nothing unique to it. The content was pre-provided, canned pages that had maybe been personalized slightly to update brand information and discuss some specialties, but it was not unique enough or action-oriented so their success was limited. We were given free reign to rebuild anything and everything as long as visitors could still be directed to their Calyx web portal to fill out a loan application and as long as there was still a mortgage calculator.
View Their Old Website
We would not be required to actually interface with Calyx (so there would be no concerns about GLB-compliance or keeping financial data secured) and would instead just link offsite for any loan-related services. However, we did need a mortgage calculator functionality.
Initially, I thought to use Calculated Fields Form which I had used on Richardson Homes for their home estimate calculator, but that was a paid plugin and we were on a budget. The same went for buying Gravity Forms add-ons to allow more complex calculations (the formulas needed weren’t possible with Gravity Forms alone – here’s some background on the necessary math). We settled on Estatic which was a free plugin and included enough design and field customization that we were able to easily make it match the website’s approved design. It was also easy to customize how each field’s limits and steps would behave so that the min/max values corresponded with common loan packages they offered.
Along the way we included several enhancements to their content for improved SEO. The first was to use Yoast Local SEO to setup location pages with proper Schema to work with the Google My Business page for each location. The second was the use of the Staff List plugin by abcFolio so that individual staff members would also have their information properly mapped to the Person Schema affiliated with the company. This involved setting up custom templates within the plugin so that a user would fill out specific fields for each profile and those fields were pre-mapped by our developers.
Since the staff list in particular might be complicated to maintain by the client in the future (as well as getting used to the block editor and some special blocks we added into their reusable library) I also wrote an “owner’s manual” for them and provided one-on-one training to their staff at the time of launch.
