CHICAGO, IL - Draper and Kramer, Incorporated, a national full-service real estate firm, is pleased to announce its new corporate website has won three CSS Design Awards: Best UI Design, Best UX Design and Best Innovation. CSS Design Awards honor and showcase freelance designers, studios and agencies for work that pushes the boundaries of user interface (UI), user experience (UX) and innovative development.
Launched in July, the new website consolidated more than a dozen Draper and Kramer sites with different URLs onto a single platform; added compelling design, clear visual branding and a unified brand “voice”; and upgraded usability in all aspects of the site.
“The site is not only beautiful, but also very functional and easy to navigate,” said James Love, vice president of marketing and brand for Draper and Kramer, who directed the redesign with Clique Studios. “Organizationally, Draper and Kramer is complex and highly vertically integrated. The new website makes it as easy as possible to get to know our firm and find the service, person or property you’re looking for quickly.”
Inspired by the Bauhaus architecture and design movement, the site’s design presents the company as modern and forward-looking. Highlights include a new Properties section that allows users to explore Draper and Kramer’s growing portfolio in a variety of ways and a News & Insights section that offers regularly updated content relevant to the industry.
The state-of-the-art backend system permits updates in seconds, and the site’s layout, design and management meet the standards laid out by the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 Level AA (WCAG 2.0 AA).
“We were so excited to partner with Draper and Kramer and deliver an experience that was modern, differentiated and easy to use,” said Derek Nelson, partner with Clique Studios. “The site is filled with thoughtful touches that support Draper and Kramer’s brand, like Bauhaus-inspired design, engaging animations, well-thought-out copy and one of the better property maps around.”
“Our priority for this project was to take a complex ecosystem of websites from different platforms and combine them all into one,” said Love. “The new site makes it easy to find what you’re looking for, loads quickly, has engaging design elements and is easily managed and updated. We’re incredibly proud of these awards because they show we were able to achieve our goal of helping users have the best possible experience when using our site, just as we strive to provide the best residential experience in each apartment community we own and operate.”