With competition running high in the volume builder sector, Hotondo’s ageing website was becoming a handbrake for marketing while their builder franchisees were demanding more advanced digital marketing capability from the brand.

Hotondo’s commercial and marketing directors engaged Newpath in late 2020 to redesign their online presence – transitioning from WordPress to a more comprehensive CMS platform providing the necessary tools to support their digital marketing strategy.

Aligning with the business’s Microsoft Azure environment, Kentico Xperience was chosen for its all-in-one capability as a cost effective enterprise scale Digital Experience Platform (DXP).

Newpath executed its well-honed Digital Experience program to uncover opportunities for improving the online experience for prospective home builders while connecting them with builder franchisees.

Having undertaken market research in the previous year, Hotondo were poised to significantly upgrade their online presence to meet the growing competition in the market. Newpath were engaged to analyse the competitor research, user personas, user journeys, and web performance data.

As the project consultancy was largely conducted during Covid-19 lockdowns, the Newpath team facilitated online Design Thinking workshops to extract the best ideas out of the Hotondo team with stunning results.

A highly engaged client team allowed our own designers to spread their wings to create a more immersive online journey for users.

Critically, home product and builder information was to be dynamically pulled in from their ERP. A custom API was built to integrate with this existing system. Both development and design teams collaborated to amalgamate design concepts with data schemas.

During the development phase, the Newpath team also collaborated with Hotondo’s SEO agency partner to ensure the built solution followed SEO best practice, with organic traffic being a crucial part of the digital marketing strategy that had traditionally driven business enquiries to franchisees nationally.

Built in Kentico Xperience 13, the website includes personalisation and marketing automation features with scope for further developing exceptional customer experiences.

The outcome is a highly interactive and well-branded online experience that meets the client’s business objectives and long term strategic needs to become Australia’s leading home builder.