A property site that answers the phone

A residential developer with four active projects and a website that had been built once, in 2019, by somebody who had since left the country.

The real problem was not the website

It was that every enquiry arrived as a phone call, usually in the evening, usually asking the same three things: is this project still selling, what is the price per katha, and can I see a floor plan. Three questions that a website answers for free, at two in the morning, without anyone picking up.

So the brief was not "make it look modern". It was: take those three questions off the phone.

Content types before pages

Two content types, project and unit, with everything else derived. A project has a location, a status, a handover date and a set of units. A unit has a size, a layout and a price band. Nothing is typed twice, which is the only reason a site with twenty two pages can be maintained by one marketing executive who has other things to do.

The status field is the one that earns its keep. "Selling", "few units left" and "handed over" are the same template with a different badge, and the sales team can move a project between them without calling us.

The site went from a brochure that had to be rebuilt to change a price, to something the client updates on a Tuesday afternoon.

Every enquiry knows where it came from

The form captures the project, the unit type and the page it was submitted from, and writes them into the enquiry before it reaches anyone's inbox. That is a couple of hidden fields and about an hour of work, and it is the difference between "we got forty enquiries" and "the Bashundhara project produced twenty six of the forty, and eleven of those came off the floor plan page".

Once that existed, the client stopped asking us which pages to promote.

Bengali is not a plugin

Both languages were designed at the same time, with the Bengali face chosen against the Latin one rather than dropped in afterwards. Bengali sets longer and taller than English, and a layout that only ever held English breaks the first time somebody translates a heading. The switch is per page, so a visitor reading a project in Bengali stays in Bengali.

Measured before it shipped

Largest Contentful Paint of 1.1 seconds on a throttled mobile connection, cumulative layout shift of zero, and a Lighthouse score of 98. Those numbers are on this page because they are checkable, and because most agencies quoting a website will not put a single one of them in writing.

The layout shift figure is the one that matters on a phone: it is what stops a floor plan moving under somebody's thumb as the page loads.

Handed over properly

The client owns the repository, the domain and the analytics. There is a written editing guide, four pages long, and a recorded walkthrough. We are on a retainer for changes they do not want to make themselves, not because they cannot get in.