Back in the mid-2000s, we collaborated with Serena Fox Design to create and build a website for Long Beach Island real estate broker Joy Luedtke. Joy was a frequent visitor to the Mad River Valley, and her real estate agency specialized in beautiful beachfront homes and land on New Jersey’s LBI. We constructed a content-managed website and integrated an IDX feed to enable users to search for LBI’s listings through the multiple listing service (MLS).
We managed a small Adwords campaign, supported the site’s operations, and trained the staff on entering content. While the site performed satisfactorily, we noticed a decline in user engagement over the past few years. Visitors were spending less time on the site and leaving after viewing only one page, particularly on mobile devices. Consequently, bounce rates increased, and pageviews decreased.
Furthermore, recent upgrades to IDX/MLS data providers’ APIs provided us with the necessary technical capabilities to suggest a significant overhaul of joyislbi.com.
A New Responsive and Big-Picture Website
The updates include:
- Upgrade to Universal Analytics with Google Tag Manager integration
- Advanced analytics tracking (events, conversions, cross-domain tracking)
- Responsive layout that adapts to desktop, tablet, and mobile devices
- Customization of the IDX Broker application to display all local listings using a third-party MLS application. We customized the website’s appearance and functionality and implemented a new mobile-first template.
- Development of a new content management system with usage tracking capabilities.
One Week Later
The new website has been live for a week now. We conducted a quick comparison of the website’s performance before and after the launch. The results (at least most of them) are positive! Users are staying longer on the site, and the bounce rate has significantly decreased, particularly on mobile and tablet devices.