Brand & Pepper Case Studies - My Property Malta Website Project

Project Overview

When the client approached Brand & Pepper the brief was simple. We needed to create a brand for local property that works in an international market.

‘My Property Malta’ was the brand name born out of this idea. The name was the start, we had a whole brand to build after that, and give it a home on the web. By the end of the project, Brand & Pepper had created a new brand concept complete with guidelines, complete with a new website to showcase local property on an international scale.

Our focus was on creating a recognisable name and image, and provider a customer experience online that would make property discovery easy and intuitive. Read more about the process below.

The Plan

Every business needs a name to reflect their goals and visions, and for this new concept we needed to create a name to showcase local property on an international level, while also make the brand about the customer. That’s how My Property Malta was created after prototyping a few brand names around the idea. We proceeded to create the image of the brand to communicate a fresh feeling, with a modern logo that is immediately recognisable, and works within the target market. We created a variety of logo variations to demo and picture how they could work on different mediums. We picked the energetic yellow as the final version, which coupled with a black background also evoked a sense of richness to the brand, essential for the My Property Malta brand image.

The primary aim of the design was to make the user experience functional, as we wanted to create a platform that makes property discovery easy. We focused on the navigation, making property visible at homepage level and within easy reach. Filtering also helps the user in viewing property of a certain criteria, making the platform accessible. Design followed the brand guidelines, with a bright yellow combined with black and white to give a rich and warm feeling to the website, whilst at the same time staying contemporary. Serif and Sans-serif fonts were used to balance contemporary and classic. Finally we made sure that in addition to looking good, the website loads fast, complementing the experience and optimising the code for search engines.

Branding

The branding process started with a very good understanding of the business model, following by creative meetings to establish a name that would fit the vision. We played around with a few different names, and chose the best fit to communicate the brand. We then prototyped logos until we chose a stacked logo with the brand name, and cropped version of it with initials and a golden swirl holding it all together. The colour pallet was chosen to create a warm and rich feeling that evokes elegance, communicating the essence of the My Property Malta brand.

Web Design

Developing a website with a good user experience was pivotal to the success of this project due to it’s focus online. With real estate being highly competitive we needed to create a website that make it easy for property discovery, and provide a superior experience to the viewer. Both simple and functional we are proud of the platform we created. Design is minimalistic and prioritises visuals and feature overview. We also design a custom set of icons to give the website that extra branding edge and make it recognisable.

WordPress Development

Powering the My Property Malta website is WordPress, one of the best open source content management systems (CMS). It provides the ability to update content and add new properties easily, and is a great platform for continuity since it’s a popular development platform. By developing on WordPress we opened the door for My Property Malta to add new features and customise the website long after we had delivered it thanks to the easy user interface and wide range of plugins available. WordPress has a range of benefits, such as being mobile and SEO friendly, thanks to the way it automatically scales pages to fit devices and structures code. In addition to these benefits, we don’t believe in tying our clients down to a custom built CMS.