Pinnacle

Pinnacle has many real estate advisor staff members working for them. These staff members work in different categories—like retail, industrial, etc.— and are further grouped into teams. Each team has “deals,” which is essentially a blogroll of recent activity. These three types of posts (individuals, teams, and deals) were confusing and haphazardly implemented on Pinnacle’s existing website, so they were keen on taking a more unified approach this time around.

I met with some of my fellow team members at Zenman to concoct a strategy that 1) allowed for a great visual design, 2) provided a good user experience to visitors, 3) provided easy maintenance for Pinnacle staff, and 4) stayed within budget.

Quite a challenge!

2.2The Front-End

On the front-end of the site, our strategy led to a well-organized, easy-to-use website that gets users where they want to go in as logical a fashion as possible.

It also looks amazing, but credit for that goes to the designer…

2.3The Back-End

On the back-end where Pinnacle staff go to update content, I took care to organize things as logically as possible, and added a large number of helpful instructions explaining what each field does.

Pinnacle’s old website was particularly fractured in how it presented teams. I took care to keep the information consistently organized, but also optional so if a team didn’t receive value from, say, their deals feed, they could simply turn it off.

On the back-end, my development led to three simple places Pinnacle staff could update the three post types, respectively. I then developed the website to dynamically pull in information from these places where needed, thus tackling the complexity in the development phase rather than forcing Pinnacle to address it during maintenance.